Massachusetts Bride and Fellow Nurse Wedding Guests Spring Into Action When Man Has Heart Attack

A Massachusetts bride and several of her guests sprang into action to save a man's life after he suffered a heart attack.  

Everyone at Micaela Johnson's wedding was dancing when suddenly a wedding guest collapsed. 

“We're at a wedding and we think someone's had a heart attack,” one 911 caller said. 

“We're at a wedding. We just had somebody go down on the floor,” another 911 caller reported.  

Johnson said she realized something was wrong when someone began screaming for the band to stop playing the music 

“When I turned around, I had seen this person on the ground,” she said.  

By an amazing stroke of luck, the bride is an emergency room nurse and many of the guests at her wedding were also professional nurses. They leapt into action, tending to the stricken man on the dance floor. 

“He wasn't the right color, he wasn't breathing properly, and so they went in and did a quick assessment and started doing CPR on him,” she said.  

Johnson and five guests all work at the prestigious Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.  

“This was very like spur of the moment, everybody just kind of jumped in,” one nurse said.  

It turned out the guest had what is called a widow-maker, a severe heart attack that is often fatal.  

The venue had a defibrillator, which the nurses applied to his chest. 

“It seemed like a very long time that we were working on him and doing CPR and getting shocked,” one nurse said.  

The team kept the guest alive until an ambulance arrived. They later learned he woke up and was talking in the ambulance. 

“He probably wouldn't be alive today, honestly, if it didn't happen at my wedding,” Johnson said.

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