A Sydney father who was up and talking shortly after a sudden heart attack has reunited with the people who saved his life.
Paul Gunning, 62, made a miraculous recovery after going into cardiac arrest while on his way to watch the Chelsea and Tottenham friendly on August 1.
Less than two months later, Gunning has reunited with the police officers, first aiders and NSW Ambulance paramedics who helped bring him back.
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“Without you, I’d be, well, I wouldn’t be here,” he told his rescuers in front of 7NEWS.
Gunning remembers rushing to the stadium after a carpark mix-up, then waiting for his sons at security.
He had felt healthy and had no warning.
“No pains leading up to it in the months or weeks before so it’s just a complete shock,” he told 7NEWS.
Senior Constable Ryan Page was about 50m away when the call came through about an unresponsive man.
“Maybe another five to 10 seconds of assessing him, I just told them ‘let’s put him on the ground like flat and start CPR’ and I just started doing chest compressions like the typical first aid,” he said.
Minutes later, first-aiders were on the scene with a defibrillator including Captain Roneel Chandra, who spent 22 years in the military.
“I attached the defibrillator and applied the first shock. He didn’t respond straight away, so we continued the algorithm, and we had very limited resources at that very moment, so we just waited for additional temps to roll over the top,” Roneel recalled.
“When it came up to the additional second round of shocking the patient, we administered the shock, and I looked at his face, and he started moving, and I said to him, ‘are you awake?’ And he goes, ‘yes, I am’. And it was just such a great feeling.”
Paramedics arrived to find him conscious and breathing.
“It was generally disbelief that he was up and talking, he was alert and relatively orientated,” Fahim Zaman from NSW Ambulance told 7NEWS.
“We don’t often see that.”
Gunning was taken to Concord Hospital and made a remarkable recovery.
More than 32,000 Australians suffer cardiac arrest outside hospital each year.
Only around one in 10 survives.
This Restart a Heart Day, NSW Ambulance is encouraging people to join GoodSAM, which alerts registered volunteers to nearby suspected cardiac arrests while an ambulance is dispatched.
For Gunning’s family, the importance of immediate help is painfully clear.
“It’s something that you never know you need, until you need it,” one of his sons said.
