First Aid Corps

65-year-old Silverthorne resident Jim Phillips and his wife, Kay, were taking a couple friends out for dinner July 26.

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The group was snacking on guacamole at a table near the bar at about 5:30 p.m. when one of their friends noticed Jim’s “color was awful,” Kay Phillips said. His eyes were closed and mouth was open.

She gripped his arm to keep him from falling off the chair.

“He was just total dead weight,” she said.

Jim Phillips was experiencing cardiac arrest.

Jim Phillips the Survivor

Local Dr. Heidi Worth was in the restaurant and immediately started CPR with the help of other medical professionals who happened to be there.

Frisco police officers arrived with the automatic external defibrillator, which is deployed in squad cars across the county through a federal program.

Summit County Ambulance Service medics and firefighters with Lake Dillon Fire-Rescue arrived moments later. The ambulance people worked with Jim on the scene for 31 minutes before taking him to St. Anthony Summit Medical Center in Frisco.

He was later flown to St. Anthony Central Hospital in Denver, where two stents were inserted into the artery that had been blocked.

Jim Phillips doesn’t recall much of the experience beyond taking his seat at the restaurant.

“The chairs were high. I just let (my shoes) drop,” he said. “And that was it.”

Phillips returned to the restaurant Thursday with one of the automated defibrillators that helped save his life. He also shared a table with the first responders. Thursday’s reunion included people from the fire district and ambulance service, and the medical professionals who were on the scene during the incident.

Phillips donated a defibrillator to the restaurant through his employer, Silver Springs Citrus of Florida, after hearing about a cardiac arrest victim elsewhere who wasn’t so fortunate.

“If it helps somebody, then great,” he said.

When longtime friends Nancy Murchison and Craig Burdsall hit the road for a July 4 weekend getaway, neither had any idea that an ordinary road trip would soon turn into a fight to save a friend’s life.

Nancy Murchison the Saviour & Craig Burdsall the Survivor

“We were on our annual trek up to Klamath Falls, and we stopped for breakfast like we always do,” near Woodland, Murchison said.

After arriving, Murchison went to find Burdsall, who had stepped away to make a phone call. Spotting him in a nearby booth, Murchison was shocked at her friend’s condition. “He was stiff as a board and he was moaning. I called his name but got no response,” Murchison said.

“I thought he was kidding,” she said. But it was no joke.

After shouting for someone to call 9-1-1, Murchison said she pulled Burdsall to the ground and started doing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on the 185-pound man.

As a nurse working for Kaiser in Napa and other locations, Murchison said she’s been trained in CPR many times, but has never had to use it in an emergency. Even so, “I didn’t hesitate,” she said. “I went into mechanical mode. I wanted to save my friend’s life. I knew that if I didn’t do something he wasn’t going to make it.”

Soon afterwards, a volunteer firefighter with a portable defibrillator came onto the scene, Murchison said. The firefighter quickly placed the defibrillator stickers on Burdsall and the machine shocked him, she said. But there was no heart rate. The machine shocked Burdsall two more times, again without a response, Murchison said.

Murchison continued performing CPR. “I didn’t think about stopping,” she said. “I wanted to keep him alive.”

“Was I scared?” Murchison said. “You bet I was.”

Right before an ambulance arrived, Burdsall suddenly took a shuddering breath. “His color started coming back to normal, and I felt for a pulse,” she said. “It was very weak but it was there.”

“I had no idea how long I’d been doing CPR,” she said.

Burdsall was quickly taken away to the nearest hospital where doctors determined he had suffered from cardiac arrest, Murchison said.

Burdsall, who lives in San Francisco, said he doesn’t remember much about the day before his attack. “I have this vague recollection of running that morning and not feeling well,” he said. “But that’s it.”

After his cardiac arrest, Burdsall said doctors inserted an implantable cardioverter defibrillator into his chest to prevent further attacks. Nine days later, he left the hospital.

Burdsall said he didn’t come to terms with the full impact of what had happened and how Murchison had saved his life until after he came home. “I was in quite a bit of shock,” he said.

“Reacting as quickly as she did, I’m certain she prevented any permanent brain damage,” he said. “Saying ‘thank you’ just doesn’t seem like it’s enough.”

“They told me he had a 1 percent chance to make it because he had been without oxygen for so long,” Murchison said. “One percent stands for hope. And I felt that was really poignant in Craig’s case. He beat the odds.”

“I hope I never have to do it again but it makes me feel good,” to save her friend’s life, Murchison said.

Get trained in CPR, she said. “You don’t have to be a medical person to save someone’s life.”

A 60-year-old Canadian man has Telluride Fire Protection District paramedic Jill Masters and an automated external defibrillator to thank for bringing him back from the edge after he collapsed from cardiac arrest at the top of Grouse Mountain in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Jill Masters the Saviour

Masters was climbing the popular hike known as the Grouse Grind located just outside downtown Vancouver on Saturday, Aug. 21, with her husband, San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters, her daughter, Paige Mallette, and some friends, when their sunny, Saturday morning adventure unexpectedly turned into a life-or-death emergency situation and, for Masters, a busman’s holiday.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is crazy,’” Masters said of her reaction to the throng of humanity coursing its way along the grueling 1.8-mile, 2,800-foot climb up the face of the mountain. The crowd included everyone from experienced hikers to young women wearing flip-flops and Hello Kitty backpacks, she said.

“It’s like going straight up the Telluride Trail, but a little more intense,” she described.

“There are a lot of people on that trail that should not be there.”

As she reached the top, Masters heard someone yelling for a doctor and made her way over to the sound of the shouting to find a man lying on the ground.

She bent down to check him, discovering that “he was clearly in cardiac arrest,” she said.

She began administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation as Bill Masters, an off-duty firefighter, and a Grouse Mountain patroller carrying a pack with first aid equipment including an AED (similar to about a dozen publicly accessible units in Telluride including at the Coffee Cowboy, outside the Nevasca Realty office and in the Gondola station) arrived to help her, she said.

While a Canadian newspaper credited the patroller with saving the man’s life, Masters said that he provided her with the AED, but did not actually use it.

The device available to Masters was designed for use by a layperson, as are those found throughout town. They work by assessing irregular heart rhythms through adhesive electrode pads applied to the victim’s chest. If the rhythm is determined to be one of two specific types, they then prompt the operator to deliver an electric shock to the victim’s heart.

That shock stuns the heart, allowing it to reset itself to a normal rhythm.

“I put the patches on…and I shocked him,” she said.

“He started breathing again.”

By then Mallette, a graduate of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center School of Medicine who just entered an orthopedics and sports medicine residency at the University of Washington in Seattle, had arrived on the scene and was able to confirm that the victim had a pulse and was breathing.

While foot power is the way up the Grouse Grind, getting back down again requires a tram ride to the bottom of the mountain. With that the ad-hoc emergency response team got the man into an emptied tram so he could be delivered to a Vancouver hospital by a waiting ambulance.

“There’s a stream of people directly above you, almost like a stairway, and you’re in the trees the whole time,” said Bill Masters.

“If something happened halfway up, you can’t get a helicopter in there,” he continued. “He was fortunate that he finished.”

Once at the hospital, the man was induced into a coma and treated with therapeutic induced hypothermia, Jill Masters said.

“I got a call from his daughter,” she said. “She said that two days later her father woke up and recognized them.”

“We felt good that he made it,” she continued.

“It was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.”

During a daily fire station inspection, Steffan Summer, who used to be an EMT in California, says a passenger brought to his attention a man who “didn’t look so well.”

Summer took a look at the man and found that he was sitting, not breathing and didn’t have a pulse. He retrieved medical equipment and was joined by 2nd Mate Peter Mallack and Chief Mate Brett Bartnanan who helped him examine the man.

“It was hard to tell if he had a pulse or not because you can’t tell with the vibrations of the propellers and the way they oscillate in the water sometimes,” said Summer.

Summer says they put him on automatic external defibrillator, and when there was no shock advised, they knew he had a pulse, though it was probably very faint. They then helped him breath, raised his feet and put him in the shock position until the man regained consciousness.

Summer believes that the man had a condition that required an internal defibrillator and once they were able to help him breath, it shocked his heart into a rhythm.

When they reached the dock, the Seattle Fire Department was waiting. “It was the longest 30 minute ride to Seattle that I’ve ever had,” said Summer.

Summer says that passengers were very courteous when the ferry reached the dock in Seattle, and that they let the firemen on right away to assist the man.

According to laws that protect privacy, Summer says that he doesn’t know how the man is doing, but assumes he is okay, in part because they were conversing on the boat before they docked in Seattle.

A football player collapsed during practice at Spruce Creek High School and was taken to a hospital.

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The boy was identified by teammates as defensive lineman Jordan Peterson, a senior. He was hit in the chest by another defensive lineman during a drill and fell to the ground in cardiac arrest.

Volusia County rescue workers received a 911 call about 5:55 p.m. about an injury at the Port Orange school. The caller said an athletic trainer was performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the player, Smith said. With the trainer’s help, n off-duty police officer and an assistant coached zused an automated external defibrillator donated by Port Orange Fire Rescue to restart the boy’s heart, witnesses and officials said.

Defensive lineman Shayne Laidler said the two players rolled over after the tackle, and nothing initially seemed out of the ordinary. Then Jordan walked about 10 feet away, went down on one knee and appeared to be catching his breath, Shayne said. One of the coaches asked if he was OK, and Jordan waved him off, then rolled over onto his back, Shayne said.

Jordan Petersen the Survivor

A few seconds later, a coach walked over and asked if Jordan was all right and got no response.

“I saw it happen,” said Dillon Cheney, a football player. “I guess he just got hit in the chest the wrong way and when he got hit, I guess all the air came out of him and he went like ‘ahhh.’ And then he like laid there and we thought he was fine, but he never got back up.”

Jordan Peterson was taken to Halifax Medical Center in critical condition, but he is now listed in good condition.

Hospital officials said Peterson came out of a medically induced coma alert and talking.

Updates

“I feel very tired,” Jordan said Wednesday from his home in Port Orange. “I don’t feel a whole lot weaker than I was [before]. I just feel like it was a bad day.”

“I’m feeling greatly improved,” the teen said. “Not yet 100 percent, but feeling a lot better.”

“I guess I’m going to be a motivational speaker if I can’t be a contributor,” Jordan said. “I’m going to miss playing football, but what I will miss most is being around the team.”

Although does not remember the hit during practice, he does remember having the fingers on his left hand taped before that day’s practice.

While the trainer applied tape, Jordan noticed an unfamiliar machine nearby and asked what it was.

The trainer said it was a defibrillator, a device used to start a heart after it stops.

“Have you ever had to use it?” Jordan asked.

“No,” the trainer said.