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Lifesaving story in Naperville involves right people, preparation

Not only were the right people in the right place at the right time to save an Aurora man's life earlier this summer. There was also the right equipment.

When Robert McCue, 80, went into cardiac arrest June 9 at Center Stage Theater in Naperville, also in the audience were a nurse and a firefighter/paramedic. Also in the building was an automatic external defibrillator.

And in a sequence of events often saved for movies, the nurse, the firefighter/paramedic, the distressed man's own daughter - a nurse herself - and the theater owner, not to mention Naperville paramedics and Edward Hospital medical personnel, all worked together to save his life.

Naperville Fire Chief Mark Puknaitis awarded all of the players with Fire Chief's Citizen Awards for their smart precautions and quick thinking that helped first responders at the scene.

"When the public gets involved," he said, "lives change and lives can be saved."

This lifesaving story began with a grandparenting class this spring at Edward Hospital attended by Kandiss Hernandez, owner of the parent company of Center Stage Theater. The class included instruction on how to perform CPR and on the help that can be provided by an automatic external defibrillator, also called an AED, which helps shock the heart back into proper rhythm.

Hernandez said she ordered an AED for her theater right away, thankful no patrons had needed resuscitation in the 17 years since she started the business.

That was in April.

Two months later, Robert McCue came to the theater to watch his 10-year-old granddaughter Casey Glassman perform in "Beauty and the Beast." He fell to the floor in the lobby before the play began.

His daughter, nurse Mary McCue, began CPR, and soon bystander Melissa Lund of Naperville, also a nurse, stepped in to help. Meanwhile, Lund's husband, a firefighter/paramedic for the Downers Grove Fire Department, ran outside looking for an AED.

While he was gone, someone found the AED already in the theater, thanks to Hernandez's purchase after her grandparenting class.

The AED appeared in real life as quickly as it does in "those super-exciting videos" medical personnel have to watch frequently during training, said Jim Kubinski, the Naperville Fire Department's bureau chief of emergency medical services.

So the impromptu crew of lifesavers used it. After less than three rounds of 30 chest compressions worth of CPR, the Lunds and Mary McCue used the device to sense the ailing man's heart rhythm. It advised them to administer a shock, and after they did, they began more chest compressions.

"He moved his leg and all the sudden he moaned," Lund said. "We checked for a pulse and my husband felt one."

The worst was over.

A few minutes later, Naperville firefighter/paramedics arrived with an ambulance ready to rush McCue to the hospital. Kubinski said they arrived in five minutes, then inserted a tube into McCue's lungs to help him breathe and started an IV. About 20 minutes after falling ill, McCue was at Edward.

At the hospital, an angiogram showed McCue had no serious blockage of his coronary artery. But a few days later, doctors inserted a small, implantable defibrillator to stimulate his heartbeat in case he goes into cardiac arrest again. A week after his heart stopped at the theater, he was sent home.

"I still get the goose bumps," Lund said.

But this lifesaving story continues.

The Huntington Swim & Tennis Club on Chicago Avenue is where the Lunds' two daughters swim six days a week during the summer, and it's a place that didn't have an AED. Two days after helping save McCue at the theater, the Lunds had raised $2,100 to buy one for the pool deck, saying their experience with helping save a life showed them the true value of being prepared.

"It has forever changed my life," Lund said, "for the good."

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