“A series of miracles,” says Dan Bolzoni, Ron’s brother, to describe what happened to his brother Dan, a resident of Pardes Hanna-Karkur, last Friday. Dan, married with one son (and another on the way), went surfing at the Sdot Yam beach on Friday morning. As soon as he came out of the water, he collapsed with cardiac arrest.
A local water sports instructor named Shahaf Shir, alerted to the scene by a young woman who happened to witness Dan’s collapse, began CPR and an ambulance was called. Dan arrived at Hillel Yaffe unconscious and on a ventilator.
“As soon as Dan arrived we saw he’d had an acute heart attack and required immediate catheterization,” explains Prof. Simcha Meisel, director of the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Hillel Yaffe Medical Center. “He was rushed into the cath lab, where an angiogram found that he had a complete obstruction of a central artery in the heart, which was treated accordingly and quickly.”
Prof. Meisel and Dan Bolzoni at the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit
After the catheterization, Dan remained unconscious, but woke up the next day. He began his recovery and started to walk around the ward, and apart from what he was told, remembers nothing.
Prof. Meisel accentuated that the CPR performed in the field immediately after Dan’s collapse, followed by his rapid evacuation by the MDA mobile intensive care unit to the hospital, together with the emergency catheterization, were a sequence of events, without which things could undoubtedly have ended quite differently.
“This is one of the most serious cases of myocardial infarction I have ever seen, especially in a young, healthy man who engaged in sports,” explains Prof. Meisel. “However, the main message Prof. Meisel wants to convey is the importance of the CPR conducted in the field by a passerby who had taken a course in basic life support.
“The young man who performed the initial CPR clearly made all the difference. Dan is recovering now and has experienced hardly any permanent damage thanks to the treatment he received on the spot and the fact that he had the catheterization procedure very soon after.”
Dan has expressed his thanks to the staff of the Hillel Yaffe Medical Center, and of course to Shahaf, who did the CPR on the beach, as well as to the MDA crew: “My family has already spoken to Shahaf and he even sent me a moving WhatsApp message saying he’s happy I’m okay,” says Dan. Now Dan will continue his recovery in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at the medical center and go home, where he has a pregnant wife and a little boy who needs him.
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