When AMR paramedic Rose Pangburn and intern Mohammed Kadid responded to a 911 call about a 19-year-old university student in Davis, Calif., they found Catherine Cai of China responsive but feeling dizzy and a little sick, stressing over her midterms. Then they put a heart monitor on her.
Her heart was failing.
“At that moment, I knew that this was not good, not good at all,” Pangburn says. “We knew we needed to get her to Sacramento as soon as possible.”
They decided to take Cai to the nearest hospital with advanced heart care: Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento, 18 miles from the university. It was the first decision from medical professionals in just a couple of hours that saved her life.
Those decisions are told in a gripping new video that includes interviews from Cai, her mother, emergency nurses, specialty physicians and others that details all the events that led to what all are calling a medical miracle.
The video shows how, in the emergency room, Cai lost consciousness due to cardiac arrest, and the two decisions in the hospital that saved her life: One was to use a machine rarely if ever used in emergency rooms that brought her back to life, and another was the use of a tiny pump that allowed her heart to recover on its own even though the cardiovascular team was preparing her for a heart transplant. She walked out of the hospital, healthy and extremely happy.
None of this would’ve been possible if Pangburn and Kadid hadn’t taken Cai to Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento, one of just a relative handful of U.S. hospitals to have achieved Certified Comprehensive Cardiac Center certification from The Joint Commission and the American Heart Association. Sutter Medical Center is the only hospital in the greater Sacramento area that has the certification and such high-level cardiovascular expertise.
“I work locally and I see all the capabilities of different hospitals, and Sutter Medical Center is the most organized, has the best teamwork and knows how to react with heart cases such as Catherine’s,” Pangburn said. “If any one thing was different in her care, Catherine would not be with us today.”
Here is the video of how Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento care teams quickly partnered to save the life of a teen from China.
