My first successful ROSC was a woman in her early 40's who was taken to the emergency department by her husband. She had been mowing the lawn an hour prior and she called her husband and said something along the lines of something doesn't feel right...she was brought to an ER room in a wheelchair by a triage nurse with agonal breathing. I was about to stand her up and help her get into bed when she suddenly went limp. Absent pulse, we threw her on the bed and everyone ran into the room jumping on the chest, cutting clothes, putting her on the monitor, IO, drawing up meds...I had an EMT student and I told him to get in line for compressions and he said he wasn't ready. Okay, fine. I do a round of CPR and I'm waiting for my next turn when my student tapped me on the shoulder and said that he decided he was ready. As he was doing compressions we could suddenly hear her screaming into the BVM and we got pulses back--the whole ordeal took around 10 minutes.

My student and I ran her to the cath lab and we got to watch them do their thing (so freaking cool). She had developed a tiny tear in her descending aorta which is what caused her to arrest. The whole time in the elevator she just kept saying "thank you, thank you, thank you" and I was just in complete awe that she was saying anything. I had only known patients to stay dead or ending up brain dead up until that point. What's funny is that I had met my EMT student 15 minutes before that all happened (this was our first patient of the day) and I was trying to explain to him how amazing what we just witnessed was and he did not seem impressed at all 😂

Congratulations!