He had seen cardiopulmonary resuscitation being done in the drama "Doc - In Your Hands", which he watched on his birthday while he was grounded at home. «Thank God, I can say now»: Matteo Ridolfi, a 14-year-old from Colognola ai Colli in the province of Verona, thanks to those gestures seen on TV and the telephone guidance of a 118 operator, managed to save the life of a 65-year-old retiree who had a heart attack while tending his garden. The man is now in intensive care, the prognosis is reserved but it seems that the worst has passed.
Matteo, the day after the act that earned him the applause of his classmates, the praise of President Luca Zaia and the nomination for Alfiere della Repubblica proposed by the mayor of Colognola, recounted what happened on Sunday 18 February in interviews with Corriere della Sera and La Stampa.
The cardiac massage
«I was going to the school field to play soccer with my friends when I heard a woman screaming. I left my bike, I ran towards her and I saw that there was a man lying on the ground». The man was the 65-year-old retiree who had a heart attack, his wife on the phone with 118 was panicking. So Matteo took charge of the situation and started following the operator's instructions: «He told me to try to remove the man's shirt, but I couldn't, so I just opened it a bit». And then I started giving him cardiac massage, carefully following the instructions on the phone: place your hands on the chest and then push, rhythmically. I kept going for a good quarter of an hour, without ever stopping, until the arrival of the doctors, with ambulance and helicopter rescue. They told me I did well». «The operators told me that without my help the man would have died. In those 15 minutes other people had passed by on the street, but no one stopped to help us», he continued.
The soccer game
After the ambulance arrived, Matteo's mom also arrived at the scene: his friends who were waiting for him on the soccer field had contacted her and were worried not seeing him arrive. Seeing the ambulance, she thought something might have happened to her son, but instead he had saved a man's life: «Mom and dad were astonished». After the cardiac massage, Matteo joined his friends on the soccer field and played until evening. The next day, at school, everyone knew what had happened the day before and they greeted him with a resounding applause. But not only that, the municipal administration and prefecture contacted him to award him a recognition in the coming weeks.This article is automatically translated