LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — A night at a Vegas Golden Knights game turned into a life-or-death emergency for one fan and a life-changing moment for three women who are now close friends.
In December 2025, Jeannie Cunningham was at T-Mobile Arena with her friend, Linda Fucci, cheering on the Golden Knights against the Chicago Blackhawks. Between periods, they started up the stairs to the ladies’ room when Cunningham suddenly felt something was wrong.
“I grabbed the railing, and I felt like a gray cloud was coming over me,” she recalled. “And that’s the last thing I remember, other than a guy yelling she’s having a seizure.”
Cunningham collapsed on the steps and went into cardiac arrest. Fucci said her friend looked “dead” until an off-duty nurse sitting a few sections away jumped into action.
That nurse was Suzie Macis, a clinical nursing supervisor and ER nurse at Southern Hills Hospital. She was at the game with her husband when she noticed the commotion in the stands.
“My husband said, ‘Somebody’s down over there on the stairs,’” Macis said. “I looked over and I immediately saw somebody down, so I just jumped over the seats and ran over. She was agonal breathing, staring straight up, and when I felt for a pulse, she didn’t have one. So I knew right away we needed to start CPR.”
On the concourse, Macis started chest compressions and kept going for what she estimates was nearly 10 minutes, calling for paramedics and an automated external defibrillator, or AED.
“It did take a while to get the AED on her, just doing CPR,” she said. “That’s what was amazing — basic CPR and AED saved her. No medicine, no doctor, just CPR and shocking her twice, and she was back.”
Cunningham does not remember the collapse, the ambulance ride or the emergency room, just waking up in a hospital bed the next morning and slowly learning what had happened.
“What would you want to say to her? Thank you, from my now working heart,” she said. “Because I owe my life to her. Literally.”
From strangers to friends
After Cunningham left the hospital, neither she nor Fucci knew who the nurse was or where she worked.
Fucci posted a short message in a Facebook group for Golden Knights fans, thanking the people who helped her friend between periods that night. A woman in Macis’ book club recognized the description and realized it might be the same nurse who had talked about performing CPR at an arena.
That connection led to phone calls, then an in-person meeting. Over the last year, Cunningham, Fucci and Macis have turned that night into the foundation of a new friendship, sharing meals, going on hikes and staying in close contact.
“She is my hero,” Fucci said. “She is my hero, she deserves to be recognizable.”
National recognition in Nashville
Last weekend, Macis traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, where HCA Healthcare honored her with one of its top national awards: the 2026 Excellence in Nursing – Compassionate Care Award, part of the company’s Awards of Distinction.
“It was shocking and I was really honored to receive the Excellence in Nursing Award for Compassionate Care,” Macis said. “I don’t need an award, I love my job, but to get something like that, I thought, ‘Wow, really, me?’”
Macis has worked at Southern Hills Hospital since 2007. She said she would have done the same thing for anyone and that the message she wants people to take from the story is the power of basic training.
“The takeaway is to always step up, always help whoever needs help, and to know CPR,” she said. “Because CPR and AED saved her. It was nothing else — no medicine, no doctor. Just us coming together and just AED and CPR. Any minute, it can mean life or death.”
As for what’s next, the trio said there’s still one thing they haven’t done together since that night at T-Mobile Arena: go back to a Golden Knights game.
They plan to change that, hoping for nothing more dramatic than a shootout win.
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