Exactly one year to the day that friends and emergency personnel saved his life, golf pro Mark Panigoni had a party to say “thank you.”
With Christmas decorations up, holiday music playing and plenty of good food in the kitchen of his Wildwood home, the scene was a stark contrast to one year earlier.
Mark had been at a banquet with his son Jack. After the banquet, they ditched their dress-up clothes to play basketball in the Villages Charter Elementary School gym.
Mark went in for a layup and then collapsed to the floor.
Jack, who was 9 at the time, and the others thought Mark was kidding around.
To their horror, they discovered he wasn’t.
Tony Truax, a junior Buffalo volunteer coach, and another friend immediately began performing CPR.
Soon, Villages Public Safety arrived on the soon.
Firefireighter/paramedic Mike Sapp and Lt. Bradley Mattingly immediately began life-saving procedures.
For Sapp, a 2008 graduate of the Villages High School, it was his first cardiac arrest as a medic.
It went down in his career scrapbook as his first save.
“It’s terrible how we met,” Sapp said Thursday evening at the party at Panigoni’s home. “But I am so happy he is here to spend Christmas with his family.’
For Jack, now 10, it was a terrifying night.
“I saw him on a stretcher with tubes up his nose,” Jack said. “It was very scary.”
Panigoni said he doesn’t remember two days of his life.
And it was important to express his gratitude one year later to those who had saved his life.
“If they hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t be there,” Panigoni said.