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Teacher saves life of colleague whose heart stopped

A local teacher is recovering from a hands-on lesson in medical emergencies he gave his students and fellow teachers two months ago.

<p>Mara Bromberg(Right) helped to save Bill O'Neal's(Left) life after he had a heart attack.</p>

A local teacher is recovering from a hands-on lesson in medical emergencies he gave his students and fellow teachers two months ago.

Bill O'Neal's heart stopped while he was giving 40 students an ACT test.

"I always think it’s a bit ironic that I taught for two years at the Collegiate School for Medicine and Bioscience and I gave the kids some hands on experience,” O'Neal said.

This teacher of more than 30 years has spent his career giving lessons at the head of the class. But he had no warning of the big one he'd be giving right at this spot in this St. Louis magnet school on April 19.

"I don't remember coming up to this room to proctor the ACT," said O'Neal, who is 59. "I have no memory of the event at all."

Without warning, Bill suddenly collapsed in front of another teacher and more than 40 students taking a test. Statistically, that should have been the end of the story. Ninety percent of people whose hearts stop suddenly outside of a medical setting, don't make it to a hospital alive.

"I was lucky that the chain worked from beginning to end,” O'Neal said.

That chain Bill's talking about began with another teacher sitting a few classrooms away. Mara Bromberg was unaware of the medical emergency unfolding.

"It was really an accident that I came into the picture,” she said.

Then, another teacher came to her classroom to tell her Bill was having a stroke or heart attack.

"I just kind of floated in here and he's laying here on the floor,” she said.

Right away, she knew the counselor giving O'Neal CPR wasn't pushing hard enough.

"That's when things turned around,” says Mara. “We started giving deep pushes and he started taking deep breaths and the color started coming back to his face."

After about a minute, knowing an ambulance was on the way, she stopped to check on Bill, only to realize he had stopped breathing again.

"Kept pumping, he started breathing again and just talking him through it, come on Bill you're doing fine,” Bromberg said. "Say what you will about it, but I swear he heard me and I sort of saw his face relax."

Then came the next link in the chain. Paramedics arrived five minutes later.

"They had to use the defibrillator three times," she said.

About six days after his cardiac arrest at school, Bill had a quadruple bypass and a defibrillator implanted. Cardiologists say there are really three reasons why people like him survive.

“We need to get the EMS activated, we need to perform the chest compressions while someone is getting the AED, apply the AED, shock them. All of it made the difference and that is the process,” explains Dr. Michael Lim, a cardiologist at SSM Health SLU Hospital.

A process that's so successful, the Missouri legislature just passed a law making 30 minutes of CPR training mandatory before high school graduation.

“We want to go from being the number one killer of people in Missouri to at least number two, so how do you do it? Prevent people from dying," says Dr. Lim.

People like Bill, who knows without the strong hands of his co-workers, he'd be among the 326,000 people who don't survive long enough to make it to an emergency room.

"So what do you get the girl who saved your life?” O'Neal asked. “So I got Mara some flowers and some candy. I don't think that's nearly enough but I will always be indebted to her."

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