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Andrea Fonseca’s work wasn’t done after her 12-hour shift on Tower 10AB Christmas night. Just twenty minutes after Fonseca, BSN, RN, arrived home in New Bedford to unwrap presents with friends and family, her friend Steve, 35, collapsed over the kitchen table.
Fonseca sprang into action. “I picked him up, laid him on the floor and checked his pulse—he didn’t have one,” she recalled.
Fonseca ordered her partner Tyffaney to call 911 and began CPR. For nine minutes, she performed chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth breathing while waiting for the EMTs to arrive.
“It was the longest nine minutes of my life,” Fonseca said. “I was the only one there who knew how to do CPR, and I had never done it outside of the certification class.”
EMTs arrived and took over resuscitation and then rushed Steve to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital. He was transferred to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where doctors discovered he had suffered a major heart attack. Thanks to Fonseca’s efforts, Steve didn’t suffer any brain damage, which could have resulted from lack of blood flow to his brain.
Steve has thanked Fonseca a thousand times over for saving his life. A nurse to the core, she asked him to show his gratitude by taking better care of himself. “I told him the one thing he could do to thank me was quit smoking, and he did,” she said.
Tower 10AB staff are proud of Fonseca, who has worked there two and a half years. “We always have regarded Andrea as a highly competent and skilled nurse,” Nurse Manager Sharon Donnelly, BSN, RN, MBA, said. “This heroic effort further exemplifies and characterizes her abilities as a nurse.”