The Right Place : Real Heart Attack Occurs During CPR Class

When Cora Manor began moaning and clutching at her chest during an American Red Cross first-aid class Tuesday, some fellow students momentarily wondered if she was feigning symptoms as part of the course.

“My first instinct was that they’d planted her in the class to see how we’d react,” said Glenn Emerson of Torrance, who was seated next to Manor.

But the students and their instructor quickly recognized that Manor was seriously ill.

“She went, ‘The pain! The pain!’ and I realized something was wrong,” said Bonny La Monica, a registered nurse and the volunteer instructor of the class at the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance.

Manor, 56, of Carson, had suffered a heart attack from a ruptured aneurysm in her aorta. Her doctor said Thursday that quick action by the class in recognizing the seriousness of her symptoms helped save her life.

At first, La Monica said, she thought Manor was hyperventilating or experiencing a muscle spasm, but soon she realized it was more than that.

“I tried to get her to listen to my voice and breathe slowly,” La Monica said. “She was kind of fading in and out for a while.”

La Monica took Manor’s pulse and others took her blood pressure. The instructor said she decided to call for an ambulance “when I could see she was not responding, and her consciousness level was going down.”

“She was just blessed at being at the right place at the right time,” said Manor’s daughter, Theresa Guidroz.

At the time, the class was learning cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, a method of external heart massage.

“Most people with ruptured aneurysms like that don’t make it,” said Dr. Ramon Cukingnan, a cardiac surgeon who operated on Manor on Tuesday night at Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance. Manor remained in the hospital’s cardiac surgical unit Thursday evening, her condition listed as critical.

“If this had happened at home, if there was nobody at home or some inexperienced people, there would have been a little bit of delay,” Cukingnan said, and getting immediate medical attention is critical in such cases. Training people to recognize symptoms and respond quickly “is why we all feel the CPR course is a very good course for lay people,” he said.

Manor was taking the class to update the CPR certification required of foster parents, said her daughter.

CPR training was part of the eight-hour, two-session course held Tuesday and Thursday at the storefront Red Cross office at the Del Amo mall.

La Monica, of Redondo Beach, said that she has dealt with a number of heart attacks in her 28 years of nursing and that a heart aneurysm killed her mother eight years ago.

La Monica said she normally finishes a first-aid class by telling her students: “Now you have this information, but I hope you don’t ever have to use it.”

But this time, she told them: “I hope you never have to use this again.”