Positivity: Co-workers give Reading man gift: second chance at life
Originally Published: 12/21/2009
When heart attack fells 55-year-old at work, folks at Teleflex Medical stay cool, save him
Michael J. Senishen woke up in a hospital bed at St. Joseph Medical Center on Nov. 10, oblivious to the previous 24 hours.
A nurse peered into his bleary eyes and said, “Mike, you’ve had a bad heart attack.”
Bad, indeed.
Mike, who’s 55 and lives in Reading, had 100 percent blockage in an artery. He was rushed to the operating room, where surgeons performed an angioplasty and implanted a cardiac shunt to keep the artery open.
What he was hearing, Mike thought, somehow didn’t make sense. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink alcohol and wasn’t overweight. He worked out six days a week, pumping 100-pound weights at World Gym in St. Lawrence.
“To call it shock and disbelief would be an understatement,” Mike said. “You think it won’t happen to you, then boom.”
But the initial shock was nothing compared with what Mike would discover as he filled in the gaps of his memory.
To his utter and everlasting astonishment, amid this season of birth and renewal, Mike would discover he had been given the gift of life.
Dwayne G. Miller was in the locker room after finishing his shift at Teleflex Medical Inc., which manufactures medical devices in Bern Township.“Person down in the hallway,” someone screamed.
Mike, reporting for second shift, had blacked out and was lying near the locker room entrance.
Dwayne, who’d been trained in life-saving techniques, rushed to his co-worker’s aid.
“I got to him about a minute after he collapsed,” recalled Dwayne, 46, of Muhlenberg Township, who’s been involved in firefighting and rescue operations for 28 years in the Leesport area. “He was unresponsive, had no pulse and was not breathing.”
Dwayne began CPR, interspersing chest compressions with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Teleflex’s safety supervisor, Gerry Hart, joined in the life-saving effort.
Teleflex has a team of workers trained in CPR and emergency techniques, including use of an automated external defibrillator, or AED. Maintenance supervisor Tom Gentile rushed one of the AEDs, which are stationed throughout the plant, to the scene. The first jolt brought no response. The second fared no better.
The clock was ticking. Twenty minutes had passed since Mike had collapsed.
Dwayne, recognizing the odds were shifting against Mike, began to fear the worst. As he prepared the defibrillator for a third deployment, an astonishing thing happened: Mike started breathing.
The breaths were faint and irregular at first.
“He was struggling,” Dwayne recalled. “The great thing, though, was that he was breathing on his own.”
Dwayne handed Mike’s care over to Western Berks Ambulance medics, who administered oxygen and rushed Mike to St. Joe’s. ….
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