CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — When 25-year-old Brandon Phung and his pickleball instructor, Roland Elizondo, got word that a tennis player had fallen onto the court not far from where their lesson was taking place Tuesday night, they started walking over to see what was wrong.
A question from a fellow player confirmed for them that the situation was dire, and Phung sprang into action.
“Can you do CPR?" he was asked. "And I ran, and I immediately began doing compressions on the man."
The man was suffering from a heart attack and he was non-responsive for the first three minutes of CPR.
Finally, Phung got some positive signs.
“He started to move a little bit more," he said. "We could feel a little bit of a pulse on him."
A few minutes later, Corpus Christi firefighters and paramedics arrived. They used a defibrillator to shock the man's heart back into rhythm before taking him to the hospital where he's now recovering.
"I’m really happy he’s alive, that he’s breathing, and he gets to see his family," Phung said. "I’m grateful for that.”
Elizondo is thankful too.
It turns out, he has a close relationship with the man who had the heart attack, and he's thankful for Phung's efforts to keep him alive.
"If it wasn’t for Brandon, I don’t think we would have had my friend here today,” Elizondo said.
Phung says he was just doing his job.
“It’s part of my training," he said. "And I feel like if you have training, it’s kind of what you should do. So I don’t see myself as a hero."
Our local American Red Cross offers CPR classes for a fee. To find out more about their classes, visit their website.
