Photo: contributed
UBCO student Kim Davarani hugs Murray Forbes heart attack victim.
Murray Forbes is lucky to be alive after suffering a massive heart attack on the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia in February 2022.
Forbes is 70 years old, but returned to school to earn an engineering degree.
Luckily for him there were other students on campus when he became disoriented and suffered a heart attack.
He was found unconscious by a group of students, including first-year human kinetics student Marissa Burfield, a member of UBCO’s team of senior emergency officials.
“I saw people around a man lying on the ground,” Burfield says. “I really couldn’t believe it was happening. It was a bit of a shock. But my muscular memory came in. You can train a lot, but once you’re in a situation, you don’t think, you just move.”
Emergency team member Kim Davarani joined the effort and quickly determined that Forbes was not having any seizures.
“People thought it was a seizure, but when I started taking vital signs and checking their circulation, I realized that this was no longer a seizure call. This was about to become a very intense call. Says Davarani.
UBCO student Morgan Tucker arrived minutes later.
“We know the statistics: when someone is in cardiac arrest, the result can be very sad,” says Tucker, a senior member of the emergency team.
Students performed CPR for 22 minutes and used an automated external defibrillator twice to make the patient’s heart beat.
Earlier, after suffering two previous heart attacks, he had signed a non-resuscitation form (DNR). But that day, fate took things out of his hands.
“I’ve always been inflexible with the DNR because I was afraid of not being competent if I was resuscitated,” the 77-year-old says. “This time, of course, I wasn’t able to make any decisions. And that’s a good thing. Those students intervened and saved my life.”
Forbes has fully recovered and is now equipped with a pacemaker for his heart disease.
Forbes recently met with its rescuers on the UBCO campus and the students received a letter of congratulations from UBCO Deputy Director and Vice-Chancellor Lesley Cormack at a small private ceremony.
“It was like a happy ending and there’s usually no happy ending,” Burfield says. “It was really nice to see him. He was walking well and everything is smiling. I think it was a cherry on top and it makes you feel like it was worth it. For some reason, we were in the right place at the right time and we were trained to do it. the right one “.