Jennifer and Craig Berko were devastated last January to be told that their son Sammy, 16, could not be revived. The boy had accused himself of the disease in a climbing hall in Missouri, Texas (USA), in the middle of a rock climb.
They thought he was joking when they saw him ring the alarm bell and ask the facility’s medical staff for help. But it was all true: Sammy had passed out from a heart attack.
cardiac massage
After two hours of CPR, her heart showed no signs of activity. Doctors pronounced Sammy dead and left the parents alone next to their son to say their goodbyes. For Jennifer and Craig, it was like reliving a nightmare with your eyes wide open: three years ago they had already lost another son, Frankie, also 16 years old.
Speaking to Fox26, Jennifer said she is standing by her son to talk to him and tell him how much she loves him. And how sorry she and her husband were that they couldn’t save him. Then, incredibly, Sammy showed signs of life again. As if he had risen.
When they heard the parents’ cries of joy and astonishment, the doctors ran back. “None of them had ever seen anything like this in their lives,” the boy’s mother later said.
Upon awakening, Sammy was admitted to TIRR Memorial Hospital in Houston. After the heart attack, the boy suffered slight brain damage, which manifested itself in a loss of short-term memory: “I don’t remember anything on the day it happened. The last thing I remember the night before was that we had to sign the waivers online (for the gym, ed.) and then I woke up,” he said.
The boy also suffered a spinal injury that caused him to lose feeling in his legs: doctors put him through various physiotherapy sessions to help him walk again. “He’s miraculously alive,” they told his parents.
What happened to Sammy Berko
Doctors at the Texas hospital where Sammy Berko was hospitalized then discovered what had happened to the boy during those horrifying moments at the gym: the young man had been stricken with a rare heart complication called catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia (CPVT). . ). A pathology he inherited from his mother, the same one that took his brother Frankie, who died during a dive, from him three years ago.
Read the full article
on Messenger