After being pronounced dead for two hours, a Texas teen suddenly regained consciousness.
When Sammy Berko, 16, restored vital signs just a few minutes after being pronounced clinically dead, his medical professionals were perplexed.
The Missouri City adolescent suffered a heart arrest while rock climbing at a nearby gym on January 7 and was sent to the hospital in critical condition, according to local Fox affiliate KRIV.
Sammy was given nonstop CPR by gym staff, emergency personnel, and hospital doctors. But after two hours of fruitless efforts to revive him, medical personnel broke the heartbreaking news to his family.
“They looked at us and said, ‘I’m so sorry, but he’s gone,’” Sammy’s mother Jennifer Berko told KRIV.
The Texas medical personnels was startled to see that the teen was still alive
Ms. Berko claims that she used all of her strength to bid her son a final farewell, but five minutes later, her husband saw that Sammy was moving. The medical personnel was startled to see that the teen was still alive while the Berkos, overtaken with emotion, ran to get assistance.
“Each and every one of them afterward came to us and said that they have never seen anything like this before. Ever. Never had they ever pronounced somebody and suddenly they came back five minutes later,” Ms Jenko said. “That feeling of seeing his heartbeat, there are no words for that. There are no words. We just stood there. I mean, grateful is the biggest understatement ever to know that he might make it.”
“He is a literal miracle”- Doctor
Sammy’s brain was oxygen-deprived for at least five minutes, although only short-term memory loss set in. Additionally, he is healing from an ischemic spine injury he suffered after losing consciousness while being lowered from the rock wall he was scaling.
“We do see kids all the time here who have had CPR, but with very prolonged CPR, we typically see very severe global anoxic brain injury, so to me, he is a literal miracle,” Sammy’s doctor told KRIV.
“The last thing I remember is the night before we had to sign waivers online, and then I woke up, not even in the pediatric ICU,” Sammy told KRIV. “I woke up in the transitional ICU and that’s the first thing I remember.”
His parents informed the network that Sammy’s incident was most likely brought on by catecholaminergic polymorphic ventricular tachycardia, a rare hereditary disorder that claimed the life of their younger son Frankie in 2020.
Following many seizure episodes that resulted in brain injuries, Frankie passed away. During his final incident, his father gave him CPR, but Frankie did not make it.
“We thought we had already been through the worst of the worst,” Ms. Berko said. “We had been shopping for a car for Frankie’s birthday when we lost him and now we were two years away from Sammy’s graduation and getting ready to buy him a car for his birthday as a surprise, and then this happened.”
Sammy and his mother have since tested for the rare genetic mutation and are receiving treatment for it.
“The testing came back and my husband was cleared, but my two sons and I have a genetic mutation that apparently started with me. I never knew I had this,” she said.