CHANGE O F HEART

When Australian children’s entertainer Greg Page – better known as the “yellow Wiggle” – slumped to his knees and then collapsed as he walked off stage after a performance last month, an off-duty nurse, two quick-thinking bystanders and a nearby defibrillator saved his life.

The Wiggle was flatlining. A heart attack caused by a blocked coronary artery had put him into sudden cardiac arrest. He was minutes from death when Sydney nurse Grace Jones joined the band’s drummer and a bystander in performing CPR. “Then,” she told Australian media, “someone handed me a defibrillator.” Jones delivered three shocks with the device before paramedics arrived.

The dramatic public incident mirrored another shocking collapse of a high-profile person in New Zealand only a fortnight earlier, when harness reinsman Ricky May, 61, suddenly fell backwards in the sulky as he drove the leading runner in a feature race at the Omakau race meeting on January 2. His upper body flopped apparently lifeless out the back of the cart as the horse paced on, before May fell to the track, horrifying picnicking racegoers and those watching the race live on television. May, too, had had a cardiac arrest and, like Page, was revived by bystanders – young physiotherapist and harness driver Ellie Barron, who broke May’s ribs with the vigour of her CPR, and two doctors who restarted his heart with a defibrillator on course.

“When I got there, he was presenting like someone who had been knocked out,” Barron told the . “He just took a couple of very laboured breaths and made one very long outward breath and that was the last one he took on his own. My hand was already on his neck, and there was no pulse. That was a very