On Tuesday, October 19 between 12:08 and 12:45pm, a man (who we’ll call Ryan) began to suffer from a full cardiac arrest while walking down West 76th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues.
Luckily, a bystander who was walking by administered CPR on him before calling 911, at which point he was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side.
Ryan was in the ICU for four days and in a coma for the first two. He was released on Sunday.
He’s now okay – and the doctors at Lenox Hill said it was the CPR which saved his life and preserved his brain function.
Ryan’s girlfriend Jennifer is the one who reached out to us about this incident. She told us that Ryan is young and healthy – an active runner in fact. She believes the cause of his cardiac arrest was simply genetics.
Ryan doesn’t remember anything about where he was or who gave him CPR. But his phone was on, and it geotagged him on 76th Street. The police also verified that the 911 caller had performed CPR on him.
Ryan and Jennifer want to find this civilian hero to give them a very big thank you. While they’ve reached out to the police to get more information about the person, they currently don’t know anything about them.
UPDATE: A few hours after we published this article, the wife of the person who gave Ryan CPR read it and reached out to Jennifer (who’s email was originally included … we’ve now removed it). They have plans to meet soon.
Blessings to everyone involved in this wonderful story. Brought tears to my eyes.
A good outcome for all.
I have a similar story from July 2018 when I was on the 2 train from 72nd to Penn to head to the airport.
A man collapsed on the train and I gave CPR while we arrived at 42nd street and waited for paramedics. After I was able to leave I tried to find out how things turned out for the person in distress and the MTA or FDNY could not release any information citing HIPAA.
I guess I’ll never know.
This heartwarming story made me cry. I was friends with Dr. Lorna Breen, who passed in April 2020 during COVID. I was on a group trip with her when she jumped over a moving walkway going in the opposite direction at the Denver airport (while we were rushing to make a tight connection) and administered lifesaving CPR to a man who had turned blue, presumably from cardiac arrest. She saved his life. I will never forget her walking on the plane to all of us cheering her on. I’m so glad Ryan found his hero!