No parent expects to be called a hero for attending their child’s soccer game, but one California mom is being hailed a hero by her own son after she single-handedly saved his life.
“She’s a giver and she’s really smart and she doesn’t give up,” said Jose Agredano Jr., a 16-year-old a sophomore at San Benito High School in Hollister, California, about his mother, Dr. Gina Agredano. And when her son nearly died during his soccer game, she never gave up on saving his life.
On Feb. 16, Jose was playing in his soccer game when the ball hit him in the chest and he instantly collapsed. “I was just really dizzy, and everything was really blurry,” he said. “I tried to keep my balance, but I went down on one knee and then I collapsed,” the teenager said. “I was feeling scared and frightened, and everything was surreal and my emotions were still there because I was his mother,” Agredano said. But her training as a doctor kicked in, and she got to work. “It was game on,” she said. While performing CPR, Agredano kept telling herself: “He’s not going to die today. We’re not going to die today.”
“All of those emotions just stopped, and it was like a surge of adrenaline, this fight-or-flight-type thing, that my son’s not going to die,” she said. “That took over.”
“The ball hit him in the heart, and it threw his heart into an abnormal rhythm, and the only way to recover is CPR and an electrical shock,” Agredano said about her son, who had suffered a commotio cordis, or a cardiac arrest from a sudden impact to the chest. “In this condition, the CPR itself is not enough,” she said. “The heart has to be shocked back into its regular rhythm and it has to be done in a certain time frame. Every minute that passes, the mortality rate increases.” But Agredano kept performing CPR until a firefighter arrived with an AED device and revived Jose with one shock. “She took me into this world and she didn’t want me to leave yet,” Jose said.
“I wasn’t ready to lose him,” Agredano, a family practice physician, told TODAY, adding: “I think as a mother, it was the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my life,” Agredano said. “I always have seen her as a hero and an amazing person,” said Jose. “I looked at her a little brighter.”
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[Featured image: Gina Agredano]
Doctor Saves Son After He Almost Died During Soccer Game is an article from: LifeDaily