APPLETON, WI (WBAY/CNN) - Andrea Benrud is alive and well thanks to her husband, Luke, and his knowledge of CPR.
It was August 2016, just five weeks after their son Aiden was born, when something went terribly wrong.
"Came in the house together, I went to change Aiden's diaper, came back in the kitchen and Andrea was just laying there. And I could tell right away that it was a really bad situation based on the coloring of her face and things like that," Luke Benrud said.
Having taken a Red Cross CPR class, he called 9-1-1 and then immediately started using the skills he learned in that class on his wife.
"I just remembered chest compressions are most important and you would have to do them harder than you would think you'd have to do them. Especially when it's your wife, you don't want to hurt her," Benrud explained.
For an agonizing seven minutes, which seemed like an eternity, he continued those chest compressions until paramedics arrived.
"Seeing somebody else giving her CPR and then somebody else hooking her up to the defibrillator, shocking her, that's when it all starts to hit me, the gravity of the situation," he recalled.
It turns out, Andrea Benrud had a rare, undetected heart defect that caused an irregular heartbeat.
After about three days in a medically-induced coma, she woke up with no clue what had happened.
"Since then, I've had an ICD placed that connects to my heart so that if it ever does happen again, it will shock me, which is kind of scary but it's a good thing," Andrea Benrud explained.
A year and a half later, she feels like her old self again.
She, her husband, and the rest of her family are all CPR trained and they hope by sharing their story, others will feel compelled to learn what to do when it could mean the difference between life and death.
"I think we're just the perfect example of people that think this could never happen to you, so CPR, Luke knowing that, he saved my life," she said.
The couple's story was featured in the online edition of People Magazine earlier this month.
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