McKee, 52, was at the airport Dec. 12 to meet his sister, who was flying in from Rochester, N.Y., for a holiday visit. McKee, who lives in Fredericksburg, is a sculptor and conservator of fine art and historic monuments, such as those along Monument Avenue.
He’d gone up the escalator into the atrium, near the security checkpoint for Concourse B, when he noticed the lights for Hudson News, a shop selling newspapers and magazines, snacks, and souvenirs.
“The lights went from white to red to black,” recalled McKee, who had no chest pains to foreshadow the heart attack he was having. “My last thought was, ‘I can’t handle this.’ I knew I was dropping.”
Business was slow at Hudson News, where Cagwin was working, and she had just mentioned to someone how boring Saturdays can be when she looked up from the sales counter to see McKee collapse.
She instinctively raced to McKee, maybe 20 yards away, and checked for breathing and a pulse. She found neither. He was, as Sheets would say later, “gone,” and the race was on not only to save him but to revive him before he suffered irreversible brain damage.
Cagwin opened the glass door to a defibrillator on the wall just above where McKee fell.
She had no training in using a defibrillator and knew cardiopulmonary resuscitation only from what she learned in high school gym class, but, she said, “I just knew I had to do something.”
She was joined by a woman on her way to catch a flight who said she worked in sports medicine, and the two of them followed the instructions on the defibrillator to apply the first shocks to McKee’s heart.
Another man stopped and began doing chest compressions. Several other passers-by stopped and helped.
Within a couple of minutes, several of the airport’s rescue workers — who happened to be downstairs and not in the firehouse a half-mile away because they were returning chairs and tables they had borrowed for a Christmas party — arrived and took over.
They shocked McKee’s heart three more times, continued to do vigorous chest compressions — McKee still has the sore ribs to prove it — and his pulse returned.
McKee, of course, remembers none of it. After blacking out, his next memory is of a shining white light, although it’s not what you might think. It was the dome light in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. He was going to be OK.
Cagwin has been drifting from job to job since high school, looking for a purposeful career to do for the rest of her life. What she did for McKee that day gave her a glimpse of her future. She is looking to enter nursing school.
“I never thought I’d be able to react that way in a situation like that, but now I know I can do it,” she told McKee. “Thank you for giving my life direction.”
McKee has wondered why things seemed to fall in place for him, but he brushes aside any suggestion that it has anything to do with him.
“I don’t feel like there’s anything special about my case,” he said, “aside from the special people around me when I dropped.”
