> The fire department put together a reunion with the dispatcher, me, my gf, the firefighters that arrived first and did the whole thing, and the EMT team, because they say it’s not often someone survives full cardiac arrest outside a hospital.

Witnessed and early compressions saved her life.

Depending on where you are in the country, even then, your chances of survival vary greatly based on where you are. NY? 11%. Detroit? 7%.

Want to survive? Have your out of hospital arrest witnessed, early compressions and defib, and have it happen in Rochester County MN, King County WA, Pierce County WA or Thurston County WA, where the numbers are in the 40s generally, and those four counties typically are the top 4, though in varying order year to year.

In many cases, what happens is that your normal sinus rhythm degenerates into a shockable rhythm (VF/VT, with an AED, paramedics may manually shock other rhythms), and then, from there, into other worse rhythms (PEA - pulseless electrical activity, asystole) which are generally much harder to come back from. Even with multiple shocks, or ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation), re-arrest is very common, because we've only really "rebooted" the heart, not solved the underlying problem, which is why the other factor in cardiac arrest survival of those origins is "door to balloon time" (i.e. from arrival in the ED to a stent being placed in the cath lab).

Stented within an hour is excellent - the current "gold standard" is still <90m, though most leading hospitals are (and should, it's already more the case in Europe) pushing for D2B of <60m.