CLEVELAND — Would you know what to do if someone near you collapsed suddenly? Well, thankfully for a Cleveland Heights man, those around him did and now he’s able to tell the tale.
“I was at the gym doing a workout,” says 44-year-old, Elias Abou Nassif.
Nassif used to work out four to five times a week and was in perfect health. At least, that’s what he thought.
“Suddenly, I feel like a blurry vision and then I passed out,” says Nassif.
In the blink of an eye, Elias was out with a cardiac arrest. Luckily someone at the gym saw him, knew CPR, and acted quickly.
Nassif says, “Without the CPR and without the AED, it wasn’t feasible to survive. They saved my life.”
“While the heart catheterization and the stent procedure are the things I think is most directly seen by patients as the thing that helped them out, frankly, it was the bystander’s CPR which is the primary reason that he’s alive today,” says Amar Krishnaswamy, section head of interventional cardiology at Cleveland Clinic.
That CPR and AED machine also saved Nassif’s family from being devastated so early on in his new son’s life.
“I have a child who is nine months old now,” says Nassif. “The only thing that I thought about when I knew that I had a cardiac arrest was my son and my family.”
Doctors placed a stent in Nassif's heart to reopen the blocked artery. Now in the middle of coronary rehab, he’s thinking about getting CPR training himself as a way to pay it forward. So if someone needs him to step in, he can help give someone else this second chance at life.
“I appreciate things more, for sure,” says Nassif. “Life is very thin. You don’t know how fragile until you pass by such experience.”
“People who have an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, they have on average, a less than 10% chance of survival without CPR by bystanders,” says Dr. Amar Krishnaswamy, who works in the cardiovascular medicine department at Cleveland Clinic.
If you’re inspired to be prepared in case something happens to someone near you, you can get an AED machine like the gym has. They usually run from several hundred dollars up to over a thousand dollars, so that may work for some companies.
If you’d like to take a CPR class, there are many places all around Cleveland that offer them, like AMA and different fire departments, click here to find one.
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Editor's note: The video in the player above is from a previously published unrelated story.