Thursday, July 27, 2006

CPR Part 4

I was on the second floor with 4 of my superintendents and my boss, the VP for Healthcare, studying on a problem at stair 6 when the call came in over Jaime's radio "Jaime, come help me, there's a man at the gate who is having a heart attack."

We all bolted for the exit, ran down the stairs, and sprinted across the parking lot toward the gate. As I was running I called the office, told the secretary to call 911, and then radioed to one of the project engineers to grab the AED and meet me at the gate. By the time I had crossed the parking lot Casey was pulling up in the truck, and Jaime, who had outrun all of us, grabbed the defibrillator from her and ran over to where a young man was sprawled on the sidewalk, writhing around and clutching his chest.

As Jaime pulled the AED and pads out of the satchel, Bill knelt down in front of the guy and checked him out. He checked to see if he was breathing, and he was. He asked if it was all right for him to hook him up to the defib, and the poor guy grunted an OK. As Bill was hooking up the defib I saw the ambulance coming down Campbell drive, just passing under the turnpike. I headed out to the road to flag them in, relieved that they had gotten rolling so quickly.

A small crowd had gathered - a few folks from the jobsite and a couple of guys that must have been walking by on the sidewalk - and we all watched as the paramedics unhooked our defib and connected their own, more elaborate unit. They ran some tests, checking the scratchings on the prinout as it spooled out of the machine. After a few minutes they decided that he wasn't in immediate danger of arrest, I guess, and loaded him onto a stretcher and into the ambulance.

It turns out that they guy worked at a construction site across the way, and had called his mother to come pick him up because he wasn't feeling well. They had gone a few hundred yards when he had the first hard pains, and either he told her to stop or she panicked and pulled over. She was too upset and talking too fast in broken English for me to understand exactly what she was saying, but the look of gratitude that she gave Bill and Jaime as her son was loaded in the ambulance was unmistakable.

This is the fourth time that we've had a cardiac episode like this on this project. The first time the man died almost immediately, and I doubt that if we'd had an AED at the time it would have made any difference for him. I'm thankful that we do have one now, and that we've had 4 CPR classes on site and trained more than 30 people in CPR and AED use since that first tragic event.

You never know when or where something like this could happen. Look at the first person you see after you read this, and ask yourself, if that person needed CPR right now would I know what to do?

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