Hermosa Beachfirefighter-paramedics Aaron Bush and Jim Bruccoleri were credited with leading roles in saving a life under difficult circumstances, after a 58-year-old Hermosa man suffered a heart attack from a completely blocked artery.
Bush and Bruccoleri responded to the man’s home via ambulance after he complained of chest pain and shortness of breath. A state-of-the-art electrocardiogram (EKG) was performed and the man was found to be having a myocardial infarction. Capt. James Crawford, engineer Aaron Marks and firefighter Sheldon Osekowsky responded on an engine crew.
Treatment and medications were begun immediately and notification was made early to Little Company of Mary Medical Center, where staff members summoned a cardiologist and a cardiac catheterization team before the ambulance arrived at the hospital with the patient.
The patient went into cardiac arrest – his heart stopped beating – 30 seconds from the hospital. Bush, alone with the patient in the back of the ambulance, began CPR while preparing the man for defibrillation, while Bruccoleri made a cell phone call to notify hospital personnel of the change in the patient’s condition.
The man regained a pulse shortly after arrival in the emergency room and was taken to a catheterization lab where he was found to have 100 percent occlusion of one of his coronary arteries. A stent was placed and the occluding clot was removed.
The patient has since been discharged home in stable condition.
“The combination of a prompt response, teamwork, rapid assessment, and recognition that the patient was having an acute myocardial infarction, treatment, and transport saved this patient’s life without a doubt,” said one of the nurses at Little Company. “I rarely see a scenario like this work so smoothly and patient outcome turn out the way this one did.”
The Fire Department’s EKG machines were upgraded more than a year ago with funding from Little Company.
The upgrades allow firefighter-paramedics to hook 12 lead cables from a heart monitor onto a stricken victim, and then use blue tooth to transmit 12 “views” of the heart – in the form of an electrocardiogram’s squiggly lines – to emergency physicians. An email is then received at the medical center with the same EKG squiggles the paramedics are seeing.
As a result, when paramedics in a moving ambulance and physicians at the medical center diagnose a heart attack, medical personnel can be activated at the catheter lab, to await the patient’s arrival and perform vessel-opening procedures as quickly as possible.
The medical center spent about $25,000 for phones, two-year communication packages, and cardiac monitor upgrades for the fire departments in the beach cities, Torrance and El Segundo.
