CPR instructor has real life heart attack while pretending to have one

A CPR trainer suffered a real heart attack while demonstrating the signs of a cardiac arrest in Canada.

Karl Arps and his students had the fright of their lives when the 72-year-old first aid instructor went into a cardiac arrest during a training session.

Arps was showing his students how to spot the symptoms of one when he suffered a medical emergency in March.

He ended up being rushed to the hospital for an emergency triple bypass surgery following the incident.

Students said they first thought he was pretending before realising it was real.

Arps was feeling dizzy in the moments before the attack, while hearing his students around him saying he didn’t look well.

Next time he came around was in the back of an ambulance.

He told As It Happens: ‘From what I was told, they did everything like we told them to do in CPR class.

‘Thank you does not seem enough. They saved my life, period.’

The students jumped into action when Arp’s hands curled outward, his face contorted and he started to snore, Logan Lehrer, a firefighter learning first aid at the Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, said.

Another instructor tried to wake up Arps before realising he wasn’t fooling around.

He told CBC: ‘That’s immediately when we started responding to the situation.’

Lehrer alerted the emergency services, while five other students performed CPR and used a defibrillator on the 72-year-old.

Arps said after his bypass surgery that he is lucky to be alive as many heart attack cases he has been involved with end up passing away even after successful CPR.

He CBC: ‘I’ve been in practice for a quarter of a century, and I can count the number of CPR saves that I’ve had on one hand.

‘[Sometimes] we get a pulse back in the ambulance or on scene, but the person ends up passing away two or three days later in the hospital.’

An ambulance chief, Nick Romenesko, said the students’ early recognition and the immediate actions ‘directly contributed to Mr Arp’s positive outcome.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.