The weather was perfect, there was music and laughter, and at the reception afterward, there was lots of dancing and good times to be had.
At first, Micaela Johnson’s wedding was perfect…but then everything came to a grinding halt.
Ask any bride and they’ll tell you that a lot of thought and planning goes into a wedding. There’s the dress, the catering, the guest list, the photographer, and so on. There’s even a rehearsal dinner to make sure everything goes the way it’s supposed to!
However, sometimes life has a way of butting into your plans just to shake things up!
When Micaela Deary married Patrick Johnson in a fabulous ceremony last month, she had no idea that she’d actually be working on the job. Micaela, who is an emergency room nurse, told Inside Edition:
“We were dancing and I heard somebody screaming for the band to stop playing the music.”
The festivities suddenly came to a screeching halt when one of the guests suddenly collapsed on the floor.
In a stroke of luck, Micaela’s friends were also nurses, and they immediately switched from guest mode to nurse mode to save this man’s life.
In a 9-1-1 recording, one of them can be heard telling the operator, “We’re at a wedding and we think someone’s had a heart attack.”
“He wasn’t the right color, he wasn’t breathing properly, and so they went in and did a quick assessment and started doing CPR on him,” Micaela said.
The man had suffered what’s known as a widow-maker heart attack, and yes – it’s as bad as it sounds!
According to the Cleveland Clinic, this type of heart attack blocks the artery that delivers the most blood to the heart, and a lot of damage can be done if the blood flow is not restored quickly.
Thankfully, the venue where the wedding took place was equipped with a defibrillator. Being nurses, they already knew how to use it for maximum effectiveness.
“My colleagues were running a full code on the dance floor at my reception.”
Amanda Berger and Laura Hoover worked in tandem to do chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth, using the defibrillator three times before first responders arrived.
Even though they were wearing their formal dresses at the time, the nurses didn’t hesitate to drop to the floor and shock the dying man’s heart back to life.
Amanda remembers that “it was chaos, but a controlled chaos with us among the group.”
This is the dream team that we wish we had as friends!
Thanks to the quick action of these women, the man regained consciousness in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. “He probably wouldn’t be alive today, honestly, if it didn’t happen at my wedding,” Micaela says.
Pictured below are Brigham hero nurses Olivia Smith, Amanda Berger, Laura Hoover, Amanda Haimaidi, Liz Campbell, and Nora Kate O’Brien.
Watch the video below to find out more about these wedding day heroes.
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