Positivity: Right place, right time
Posted: December 6, 2009
Quick action by school nurse and police officer saves teenager with undiagnosed heart condition
Victor Venegas remembers almost nothing about what happened to him last week at Broad Ripple High School — just that he didn’t feel good, his girlfriend was walking him to the nurse’s office, and then he woke up in the hospital.
He doesn’t remember that his heart stopped beating or that his mother panicked when she arrived and saw his face was blue.
And he doesn’t remember the actions of two school employees who saved his life.
“I don’t remember it,” he said by telephone from his hospital bed Thursday. “I was just weightlifting, and my heart started hurting. My girlfriend was walking me to class, and I told her to take me to the nurse.”
He didn’t make it to the nurse’s office, but school nurse Lisa Aughe rushed to him, radioing for help when she saw the 18-year-old having a seizure.
By the time Indianapolis Public Schools Police Sgt. Mark Driskell arrived and called for an ambulance, Venegas had stopped breathing.
It turned out he had a previously undiagnosed heart condition called Wolff-Parkinson-White Syndrome, a defect in the timing of the electrical pulses that regulate the heartbeat.
Venegas had felt out of sorts early Tuesday and wanted to stay home from school, but his girlfriend persuaded him to come so she wouldn’t be at school without him.
In the end, her request probably helped saved his life: Had he had the heart attack at home alone, he likely would not have been able to call for help.
Instead, he was around people who were trained in CPR, including the nurse.
“You could tell he was turning blue,” Driskell said. “I asked if we should start CPR, and she said yes.”
The teen who collapsed in the stairwell is popular with the school staff, who describe him as a funny boy, a wrestler and the kind of guy who helps the younger kids learn to use the weight room.
The principal made an announcement over the PA system, placing the school in lockdown. Venegas’ mother rushed to the school from her job at Lowe’s at Glendale Town Center.
Driskell and Aughe had been trained in CPR, but neither had ever used it before that Tuesday. They say they’re not heroes but that they did what they had to do.
“Call it fate or luck or lot,” Aughe said, “but it is just part of the job.”
When medics arrived, they shocked Venegas’ heart four times with a defibrillator to revive him and took him to St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital.
There, doctors told his parents that if he hadn’t received immediate CPR, he would have died.
“If it wasn’t for them,” said Maria Venegas, his mother, “I would have lost him that morning at the school.” ….
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