Jose Agredano was on the field for his final JV soccer game of the season earlier this month when his parents, watching from the stands in Watsonville, Calif., noticed something was wrong. They ran to their 16-year-old son, who had been hit by a ball, as he collapsed and stopped breathing. His mom, Dr. Gina Agredano, jumped into action, doing CPR on her boy for three minutes until an on-site defibrillator was brought over to shock and re-start Jose's heart. "I said to myself we were not going to die today," Gina Agredano tells the Mercury News. The ball had struck Jose on the left side of his chest, stopping his heart in what is called an impact-induced cardiac arrest.
A doctor who treated Jose at the hospital after his ordeal explains that such events are possible when something hits the left side of a person's chest at just the right time in the electrical cardiac cycle, between heartbeats. "Had it not been for the CPR and defibrillator, Jose would’ve died," she says. Jose—who managed to pass the ball before collapsing, per the Benito Link, and at first thought he'd just had the wind knocked out of him, per KTVU—is expected to make a full recovery with no long-term damage. His reaction when he woke up in the ambulance? "I was really happy to be alive, but kind of upset because I wanted to keep playing." (A teen helped save the life of the officer who was booking him into jail.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
