Can you give us a recount of what happened on that day? How did you feel?

“I was on my way to NUH in the morning at around 6.30AM in the train and then I heard a loud noise. When I turned to the right, I saw a man had collapsed on the floor, so I went up to see what was wrong. At that point in time, I think there were two nurses who had already went up to the man. There were a couple of people standing around the guy so initially I just stood at a distance first. Then eventually, one of the nurses realized that he wasn’t breathing and there was no pulse, so they started CPR. So I went forward and after the nurse did one cycle, I offered to take over, and then we just continued doing CPR.

“I think in a situation like that, even though you are a medical student, you can actually do a lot and actually when you start your clinical years, you’ll have some knowledge. Even if you can’t really do anything, you can always help out in some way, maybe crowd control and like any way possible lah, so I just thought that I’ll just go ahead and see what I can do.

“The feeling of resuscitating someone is really priceless. After the second shock, I was the one who assessed the pulse and the breathing. I was expecting there to be no pulse and no breathing, but after I assessed it, I was like, ‘ohh he’s present!’, which is quite special because it is very rare for that to happen. Usually, the statistics show that if you collapse outside the hospital, the chances of you surviving is quite low, so it was quite a pleasant surprise that it worked.”

Can you tell us one interesting fact about yourself?

“Besides med school, I do a martial art called Brazilian jiu jitsu… I’m quite passionate about it, and I’m also quite passionate about medicine, so like recently ... this year, because my friends kept asking me about injuries and everything, I actually have a blog where I write about medical issues in combat sports. I try to update it as much as possible so I’m writing an article now. It’s surprisingly quite popular, like I’ve got quite a decent viewership about the issues, and then I was actually invited for a podcast to talk about this. I guess that’s an interesting thing -- it’s like I’m trying to bring my two passions together to try to help more people.”

Check out his blog here:  https://jiujitsumedic.wordpress.com/