First Aid Corps

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.”