Tom Gould, a 56-year-old father of two, went into cardiac arrest while at his home on the evening of February 6th. On that faithful evening, Tom’s daughter, Grace, had asked if she could pay visit to a friend’s house in a nearby neighborhood. Tom agreed to take her and went to inform his son Brendan (16) that he would be leaving the house to drop off Grace. Brendan was in his room doing his homework when his father came to inform him. It was then that Brendan noticed something wrong with his dad.
“Next thing I knew, he grabbed the wall and fell,” Brendan said in an interview with TODAY. “I paused for a second and asked what was wrong.”
Tom was unable to respond to his panicking son, so Brendan did what anyone else would do in an emergency and called 911. The operator on the other end of the phone told Brendan that he needed to perform CPR on his father. Brendan had never performed CPR before, but he managed to successfully aid his father for two whole minutes before paramedics arrived to the house.
In the months since the incident, Tom is feeling much better. He told TODAY that he feels about “85%”. Not too bad considering the severity of the incident. He’s still on a list of medications, but he aims to make a full recovery very soon!
Brendan, a high schooler, never imagined that he would need to perform CPR. He had never done it before but he managed to save his father’s life through his act. Coincidentally, Brendan’s home state of Illinois passed a bill a few years back that requires all high schoolers to complete a CPR course in order to graduate. In a even crazier coincidence, Brendan was just two days away from enrolling in the course before his father suffered the incident.
Now it’s safe to say that Brendan has a little more experience that his fellow classmates!
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