Local Heart Hero Shares Life-Saving CPR Story on National Wear Red Day

National Wear Red Day marks the American Heart Association's 2026 campaign push: in a cardiac emergency, the true first responder is often an everyday bystander, not a medical professional.

Heart disease remains the number one killer in America, and cardiac arrest can strike anywhere—at the gym, in a grocery store, or on the sidelines of a child's soccer game. Yet bystanders step in only about 40% of the time, often due to uncertainty or lack of training.

Shari Chun, an American Heart Association volunteer, knows this firsthand. She was leaving a facility when she spotted a man lying on the grass with his wife hunched over him. Chun ran across the street and found him in cardiac arrest, not breathing. She immediately started hands-only CPR and continued for about five minutes until paramedics arrived.

"Although I am a nurse, the skills that I used on that day were skills that anyone in the community could have used because I only performed hands-only CPR for approximately five minutes until the ambulance arrived, and that was enough to save his life," Chun said.

Hands-only CPR eliminates mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The technique requires only hard, fast chest compressions in the center of the chest until emergency responders arrive.

The American Heart Association aims to have one person in every household know hands-only CPR by 2028. A 90-second training video is available at heart.org/handsonlycpr. Performing CPR increases a cardiac arrest victim's chances of survival two to three times.