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CPR courses sought after Eriksen cardiac arrest; "If you don't do anything then it will only go wrong"

The cardiac arrest of Danish soccer player Christian Eriksen last Saturday has led to a run on CPR courses. CPR is not difficult, medics say, and it can be life-saving. 'I don't understand why people would NOT want to learn this.'

Doctor Bernard Leenstra of Utrecht noticed a run-in at his soccer club in 2018. "I thought: let me go and have a look anyway.

On the ground lies a 12-year-old boy. Bystanders have placed him in a stable side position: they think he is having an epileptic seizure. The boy appears to be breathing, but Leenstra sees it immediately: wrong. 'It looked like breathing, but it was a reflex of the body in cardiac arrest. It sounded like a kind of ducking sound.'

The boy has been lying there for about two minutes. 'I just felt a dead child under my hands,' he says. 'Then you can be such a tough doctor - then the sweat runs down your seam.' Yet he immediately begins to act. He resuscitates the boy and, together with bystanders, connects the AED. The ambulance arrives within eight minutes.

Afterwards, he realizes one thing: everyone should take a course in CPR. Or rather, first aid. 'Everyone who takes such a course recognizes that duck sound and knows what to do.'

After soccer player Christian Eriksen went into cardiac arrest Saturday during an European Championship match and was successfully resuscitated on the field, many people understand what Leenstra means. At the Red Cross, the phone stopped ringing Monday. 'People are signing up en masse for CPR and first aid courses,' says head of first aid Eline Nijhof. 'We get calls from groups of friends, sports clubs. After the incident with Ajax soccer player Nouri, we also saw an increase, but it was not as big as now.' Also on hartslag.nu, the call system for citizen aid workers, there were hundreds of new registrations.

Every year there are about 17 thousand cardiac arrests in the Netherlands. Of these, more than 8 thousand people are resuscitated. According to the Hartstichting, of the latter group, only 9 percent survived in the 1990s. Now it is 23 percent. This is because more people have started CPR and because of the arrival of AEDs. 'But it also means that three-quarters still die,' says GP David Smeekes of the Heart Foundation.

In cardiac arrest, the first six minutes are crucial. 'Ambulance arrival time averages eight to 10 minutes,' Smeekes says. 'Every minute the chances of survival drop by 10 percent. With CPR by citizen responders, who can be on the scene faster than the ambulance, time is saved. For every cardiac arrest, dozens of citizen aid workers around the victim receive a text message asking them to help. By now, nearly 250 thousand citizen aid workers are active in the Netherlands.

'Actually, not much can go wrong during CPR,' Smeekes says. 'If you don't do anything, that's when it goes wrong. Because then someone just dies.'

Pressing the chest vigorously

Broadly speaking, CPR works like this, he says. 'First you check if someone is conscious. If not, you call 911. They guide you through the process. Then you check if someone is still breathing. If not, you start CPR. You place two hands crossed in the middle of the sternum, and then you start pumping thirty times with your arms extended. The chest should be pushed in about 6 inches. Then you breathe twice. And you repeat that.'

During this process, an AED must be connected, to shock the heart if necessary. This is not difficult, he says. 'That device just talks to you. You are guided through the whole process.

Still, there are things that don't go quite right during CPR, says citizen rescuer Dennis Gerritsen (27). Last year he took a course and less than two weeks later he was already on his knees in the living room of an unknown man in his thirties. Then he decided to give courses himself in the evenings. 'People who don't know how to perform CPR often don't dare to push the chest 6 centimeters in. For that you really have to push hard.' Sometimes even a few ribs break in the process. It is one of the reasons he opposes online CPR courses. 'You really have to feel a dummy like that.'