First Aid Corps

Mr Callaghan, who has been body surfing since 1962, was holidaying in St Ives with wife Gill, 74, Julian, daughter Sue Tallis, 47 and her children Lucy, 15, and Harry, who live in Frolisworth, near Lutterworth.

John Callaghan the Survivor

He returned to the apartment feeling cold and tired after a surfing session on July 16.

John suddenly collapsed on the bathroom floor.

His son Julian, who used to be a lifeguard at Stamford Leisure Pool, gave his father emergency resuscitation while his grandson Harry Tallis, 12, ran to the beach to ask for help.

Lifeguards Robert Sprent-Howell, James Symons, Emily Harris and Ben Tregonning collected an emergency first aid kit, including a defibrillator, and ran to the apartment where they found Mr Callaghan unconscious.

Mr Callaghan’s heart was shocked three times by the defibrillator to get it started.

Another lifeguard Sarah Rowe and the St Ives Coastguard team cleared an area on the beach for the Royal Navy helicopter to land to take Mr Callaghan, who was breathing but had a weak pulse, to hospital.

After five days in intensive care in Truro, Mr Callaghan was transferred to Glenfield Heart Hospital, in Leicester and underwent surgery to fit an implantable cardioverter defibrillator.

Mr Callaghan is now fully recovered but says he has quit body surfing.

Mr Symons said: “We were delighted and very relieved when John’s wife came down to the beach the next day to tell us that he was making a recovery.”

Daniel Beahan, 13, an eighth-grader at Regina Coeli School in Hyde Park, said he was getting ready for bed when his family heard thrashing sounds coming from his grandfather’s room downstairs.

Daniel Beahan the Saviour

It was Sept. 9 around 9:40 p.m.

Daniel’s grandfather, Edward Robertson, 80, lost consciousness and went into respiratory arrest.

The teen’s father, Joseph Beahan, called 911, and Daniel quickly went to work performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

A dispatcher instructed the family to move Robertson from the bed onto a hard surface, like the floor, Joseph Beahan said.

Daniel doesn’t remember how long he performed CPR, but after a short while, his grandfather began labored breathing .

A few minutes later, state police arrived with an automated external defibrillator device.

Robertson was connected to the device, but it said no shock was advised because his heart was beating, Daniel said. His grandfather’s pacemaker was probably a factor in that, he said.

Robertson regained consciousness in the ambulance, en route to the hospital, he said.

Joseph Beahan, the buildings administrator for the Dutchess County Department of Public Works, said his son and his father-in-law have always been very close.

“You wonder how your kids will react in an emergency situation,” Beahan said. “He got in there and did exactly what he needed to do.

“His grandfather’s here because of him,” he said. “He thanks him every day.”

Daniel was certified in CPR by the American Heart Association through a course taught by the Heart Safe Club in Rhinebeck.

“We’re proud of him, that he put the skills to use,” Forbes said. “He acted quickly and didn’t just sit by.”

Rosemary Williams, a 76-year-old retired registered nurse, was walking toward the Eisenhower High School gym with her daughter, Connie Bublitz, to watch a game to be coached by her granddaughter, Sarah Bublitz at a junior varsity match between Eisenhower and Springfield High School..

Williams, who has a history of heart problems, suddenly dropped to the ground while holding on to her daughter’s arm.

“She wasn’t responding,” Connie Bublitz recalled. “There was no response in her eyes, her face, nothing. There wasn’t any pulse.”

Connie Bublitz, a Macon County employee trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, performed chest compressions and delivered a couple of quick breaths into her mother’s mouth.

Michelle Bonebrake, the varsity coach, had just walked over to the gym’s entrance, to speak to the athletic director about an official who had not yet arrived. She spotted the elderly lady on the floor near the door.

“I assumed it was a heart attack,” Bonebrake recalled. “I kicked my heels off, ran across the gym and got the defibrillator.”

When Bonebrake returned, Jennifer Parsano, an emergency medical technician who was pulling concession duty at the game, had taken charge of the scene. As soon as Bonebrake returned with the machine, Parsano said Williams had no pulse and was not breathing.

A couple of students, A.J. Madison and David Reed, called 911.

Bonebrake placed the “defibrillator next to Williams and attached the patches to her chest.

“As soon we put the patches on, it assessed her and checked her heart rate,” Bonebrake said. “If her heart was not beating it would shock her. And it shocked her.”

Because there was no discernible response, Bublitz and another woman resumed performing CPR.

“The machine said, ‘Please stop compressions,’” Bonebrake recalled. “The machine assessed that her heart was not beating. Then it shocked her again.”

Just as emergency medical technicians simultaneously arrived from the Decatur Ambulance Service and Decatur Fire Department – four of five minutes after they were dispatched – Williams took her first breath.

“It was kind of surreal,” Bonebrake said. “I was just holding her hand, and staring into her eyes. I was saying, ‘Breathe, everything is going to be all right.’ Every time I said ‘breathe,’ she would breathe. If I didn’t say anything, she would not breathe. It was so miraculous to me, that she was fighting so hard.”

“That was the first time we ever used it, and thankfully the first time was successful,” Hicklin said. “It was a miracle. It was an extraordinary situation. I was so proud of the quick thinking of Michelle Bonebrake and Jennifer Parsano. They made their Eisenhower family very proud. Today’s been a very emotional day for all of us. It made us stop and reflect on what’s really important.”

Connie Bublitz said her mother, recovering in the intensive care unit of St. Mary’s Hospital on Friday, is doing pretty well.

She commended Bonebrake and Parsano as loving, genuine people, who were in the right place at the right time, and did a great job of helping her mother.

The night of Sept. 9, Carol Lewis, 52, felt dizzy and then collapsed in her house in the Saybrook Village housing plan in Greensburg.

Carol Lewis the Survivor

She didn’t have a pulse, according to people who were with her that night.

Her 16-year-old son, John, called Westmoreland County 911 and raced to neighbors Ron and Renee Berberick while staying on the phone with a dispatcher.

The Berbericks performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, on Lewis until two other neighbors shocked her twice with an AED.

Renee Berberick, a nurse, said Lewis had no pulse and was blue when she and her husband started CPR.

“I didn’t know that we had the AED machine,” Renee Berberick said. “There were two men that came in, and I was just so happy to see them.”

“You never think you’re going to use (CPR training), but we did,” said Ron Berberick, who works as a shift commander at the state prison in Hempfield.

Residents of Saybrook Village had bought the AED, which consists of a defibrillator, two electrode pads and connection wires, after a door-to-door fundraising campaign in the neighborhood a few years ago. The AED and three others are kept in the homes of emergency responders who live in the plan and have AED training.

“I’m a firm believer in the AED now,” Lewis said. “I think that if that wasn’t around, I probably wouldn’t be around. I didn’t know we had one in the neighborhood, actually.”

Espersen, 24, said her mother’s experience seemed like a bad dream that turned positive.

“It was a nightmare I never thought would come true,” she said of the night her mother collapsed. “Honestly, it was like something you see in the movies: You never think that it will happen to you.”

She said the quickness that her mother received CPR and shocks from the AED — all within about three minutes — saved her life.

Rob Mattes and Bill Krulac used the AED twice before getting a pulse from Lewis. Mattes said the close proximity of the AED was a factor in saving Lewis’ life. “There’s no doubt in my mind,” he said.

Lewis said she could never give enough thanks to her friends and neighbors who rescued her.

“I don’t know what you can say to somebody that saved your life,” she said.

On Oct. 15, Terry Smith was put to the test when Pearlman, a 6-foot junior center from Chicago, collapsed after running sprints following the first day of practice, lost consciousness and went into cardiac arrest.

Liz Pearlman (left) the Survivor

The 38-year-old Smith, who has been head trainer at Aurora University for six years, was routinely monitoring the women’s basketball practice as he had many times before.

“I was on one side of the court and Liz was on the other,” he said. “Like a lot of the players she was bent over, breathing hard, and then she went down. I walked over and started to say, ‘OK, Liz, let’s get up. As I got to her she was having trouble breathing and it spiraled out of control.”

He knew what to do, telling an assistant coach to call 911 and instructing coach Michelle Roof to get the automated external defibrillator in the lobby of Thornton Gymnasium while he started CPR compressions on the player.

Roof sprinted back with the device and took over those compressions as Smith started to hook it up.

It shocked Pearlman twice, who later started bleeding from her nose and mouth, likely due to blood clots in her lungs that weren’t diagnosed until two days later.

An assistant coach had the players clear the gym, paramedics arrived and Pearlman was taken to an ambulance, which remained in the parking lot at least 20 minutes before she was stabilized and ready to be transported.

Her parents, notified by assistant trainer Nicki Pieart, were on their way to Aurora.

“It was very scary,” Richard Pearlman said. “We’re dealing with rush-hour traffic and the rain. We were in terror in our car because you don’t know if she’s alive or dead. There was a 25- to 30-minute window where we didn’t know.”

Later that night in the intensive care unit, Liz awoke to find she had been intubated with a breathing tube.

“She signed, ‘I love you’ with her hand,” said her dad, “and it was the first time I knew that her brain was OK.”

“For years you say, ‘Thank God, I never had to use it,’” Smith said of his skills in cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He’s taught CPR classes many times. “As I tell my classes, ‘You learn it and it seems monotonous, but there’s a reason for it.’”

“When I saw (Liz) at the hospital Friday, it was a big relief; she was definitely looking better,” he said. “And then when I went back Saturday, it was one of the happiest days of my life. She looked good and was able to talk to me.”

John Dow, 48, was playing in an adult hockey league two weeks ago at the Schwan Super Rink in Blaine, when at center ice, his heart stopped.

John Dow (left) & Dr Evan Domeyer

From that point on Dow only knows what his teammate have told him. “I dropped to my knees. I grabbed my helmet, and I closed my eyes and I fell to the ice.”

Enter Evan Domeyer, who was lacing up his skates in the locker room of an adjacent rink, when someone ran in looking for help. Domeyer wears a different uniform off the ice: that of a physician at Mercy Hospital.

“I was a little shocked when I got there to see what I saw,” he recalls.

Domeyer estimates 20 people were standing around Dow, who lay motionless on the ice. Wisely, someone grabbed the ice arena’s portable heart defibrillator. But it too lay on the ice next to Dow.

“Pretty much everybody was just standing around,” says Domeyer. “It was just laying on the ice.”

Domayer grabbed the device and put it to work. “We got him hooked up and it shocked him right away.’

Dow started breathing again. Two weeks and six heart bypasses later he’s been released from the hospital.

“I had what they called sudden death,” said Dow Wednesday from Mercy Hospital in Fridley.

“I’m grateful to have gotten to know him under these circumstances,” said Dow, his arm around Dr. Domeyer.

A 50-year-old Long Island man fell ill on a Brooklyn-bound A train, packed during the evening rush hour.

Officers responded to the emergency call and rushed to the scene with a portable automatic external defibrillator.

They found the good Samaritans, one of whom happened to be a cardiologist, performing CPR on an unconscious man on an a train.

When Mr. Kiernan collapsed on the floor of the A train headed southbound from 125 street, Dr. Sonia Tolani a cardiac fellow at Columbia Presbyterian just happened to have left her job early that day.

“It was just fate. I would have never been on a train at 4:30 p.m.,” she said.

Good samaritan Anthony Medaglia also left his job early and was able to help the doctor perform CPR all the way down to 59th street.

“And we just continued CPR chest compressions the whole way down,” says Medaglia.

Officer Joseph Dellauniversita, 23, who was appointed to the force in January 2008, used the device to shock the victim, but it did not work. However, a second attempt was successful.

“We shocked him again and he gasped for air and his eyes started moving and it was a great feeling,” says Officer Joesph Dellau.

The man was taken to the hospital, where he is currently in stable condition.

“I really have a second chance at life here,” says Kiernan. He adds, “I cheated death really.”

Gary Pigott, 73, got off a golf cart and fell to the ground near the end of the 18th hole.

Gary Pigott the Survivor with Peter Quick the Saviour

No one with him had a cell phone. A woman who sells beverages from a cart used her radio to call the clubhouse and get help on the way.

The woman travels throughout the entire course but just happened to be right there when Pigott went down, Quick said. “It was total luck.”

Luckily, too, the18th hole is near the clubhouse and Quick, 35, ran there and took over CPR from an older man who was too tired to go on.

Quick told Pigott he had almost finished the hole, “It was your last shot. I thought, poor guy, last shot of the day.”

Pigott asked, “Did I look bad?”

“White as a ghost,” Quick said. “Toward the end, it was blue.”

It looked so bad to the cart woman that she cried the whole time, he said. “I said, look away, look away.”

Quick and others did CPR for about six minutes before medics arrived. The medics shocked Pigott with a defibrillator two times. No heartbeat. They hit him again and got just a fluttering beat. They hit him a fourth time, got a regular heartbeat and rushed him to a hospital just down the road.

Pigott has been out of the hospital about two weeks and won’t be able to play golf for at least six months, he said.

He knows now how very lucky he was, he said. “I can’t believe how circumstances came together so perfectly.”

Also, he said, that could have happened while he was driving or while he was alone at home.

“Whatever time I have left, I’m going to try to use it well,” Pigott said.

Lindsey Roskos and Ron Matusiak were the first to reach the man. Both could tell immediately that the situation was serious as the unresponsive victim’s breathing grew labored and his pulse drained away.

Ron Matusiak the Saviour

“There was no doubt something was really wrong,” Matusiak said. “You could just feel the pulse go away.”

Roskos, who was CPR-certified as an employee of Black Hills Workshop, started chest compressions while YMCA staffers called 911 and delivered the AED to Matusiak.

As the AED coordinator for the Federal Aviation Administration office in Rapid City, Matusiak proved to be the right person in the right place at the right time.

“I didn’t think. I didn’t have to think. It went exactly as it’s supposed to,” he said. Matusiak credits the saved life to the “excellent training” that the Red Cross provides, to the YMCA for having an AED on the premises, and to God.

“I just had to push a button,” he said.

By the time Roskos, 25, had performed two cycles of CPR – 30 chest compressions followed by two rescue breaths – the defibrillator was ready for use and it was telling Matusiak (it speaks instructions aloud) that no heartbeat was detected and a shock was advised.

After yelling “stand clear” numerous times, Matusiak pushed the button.

“His body kind of arched up and … the minute I laid my hand on his throat, you could feel a pulse.”

Matusiak remembers thinking two things:

“This is a miracle.”

And … “Hey, these things work.”

Within minutes, emergency medical personnel arrived on the scene. Soon, the man was speaking and trying to sit up.

As the patient was being loaded into the ambulance, Matusiak asked paramedics if they needed any information from him.

“He said, ‘No, but this guy has something for you.’ The man reached up to grasp my hand. I started crying. I’m just so happy he’s alive. I just thank God for that,” he said.

The unidentified man remained hospitalized Thursday.

Two days later, Matusiak’s emotions were still close to the surface.

“It was intense. The most intense thing I’ve ever experienced – and I’ve had a divorce and a war,” he said. “Here’s this dead guy that, all of a sudden, is OK.”

Cpl. James Streeter, 37, said he was at home cleaning around 9 a.m. when his doorbell rang. He opened the door to find Pastor Greg Ball’s wife Bobbie on his porch very upset. Streeter said he is friends with the couple and attends Destiny Church.

Bobbie Ball told Streeter that she and her husband had been jogging in their neighborhood when he suddenly collapsed. She said she knocked on the doors of several neighbors in an attempt to get help, but nobody was home.

That’s when she saw Streeter’s patrol car parked in his driveway and rang his doorbell.

Less than a mile into the run, Greg, who had turned 48 the day before, collapsed. “We usually jog to the left and this time we jogged to the right,” says Greg. “We made a jog around and from that moment on, I really didn’t remember anything that happened. My wife said I took off running, got about a hundred yards ahead of her, and just dropped.”

Streeter said he called Collier County Sheriff’s Office’s Communications Center and then drove a quarter of a mile to where Ball was on the ground.

Ball wasn’t breathing and didn’t have a pulse.

Streeter removed the AED from his patrol car, hooked it up to Ball and gave him one shock. Streeter then administered CPR until Ball started breathing on his own.

Paramedics arrived shortly after and transported Ball to a local hospital.

“The next thing I remember,” says Greg, “was waking up in the hospital and hearing the amazing story of what God did for my life.”