First Aid Corps

A 50-year-old passenger collapsed in the Sky Harbor Airport’s security checkpoint line Monday morning at 5:35 a.m.

Two witnesses who happened to be nurses performed CPR on the man, and when a Phoenix Police officer got there, the passenger was not breathing.

Officer Brian Warren located an automated external defibrillator and used it to shock the passenger one time.

By that time, Officers Kim Walsh, Tim Essick and Paul Rooks arrived on scene and took turns performing CPR on the passenger.

When firefighters arrived, they transported the patient to the hospital in critical condition.

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.”

On her way home from spending Christmas with her daughter and granddaughters in Queensland, the 56-year-old Victorian woman Cherie Day’collapsed at the airport while waiting for her baggage.

All she remembers is feeling dizzy and thinking she might have sunstroke.

But when she slipped into unconsciousness and her heart stopped beating, strangers came to her aid.

Melbourne man Ruvi Herzog, Darwin woman Tracey Moore and Tiger Airways flight attendant Christy Hau were among those whom Ms Day now calls her “angels”.

Cherie Day the Survivor

Mr Herzog commenced CPR, Ms Moore performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and Ms Hau found a public-use defibrillator on an airport wall and brought it to the scene.

Mr Herzog used the device to give Ms Day two heart-starting shocks before airport fire service officers and paramedics arrived.

She was rushed to Royal Melbourne Hospital, where surgeons unblocked a major heart vessel.

Mr Herzog was thrilled to see Ms Day alive and well. “It puts shivers up your spine, you can’t believe it. It’s the best outcome you could ever ask for, so it’s wonderful,” he said.

Ambulance Victoria emergency medical response coordinator Andy Watson said Ms Day survived thanks to the efforts of those who rushed to help her and having the public-use defibrillator nearby.

“These machines are foolproof, they are a lifesaver,” Mr Watson said.

“I’ve been give another chance,” Ms Day said.

“To maybe correct some errors and do some positive things. Yeah, a second chance .. and I’m going to take it.”

The Melbourne supervisor of public works and a volunteer firefighter Gary Fricke had arrived at the Des Moines International Airport to pick up his son and daughter-in-law, who were returning from an overseas trip.

Gary Fricke (3rd from left) the Saviour

As they were making their way to the baggage claim, he noticed a man lying on the floor of the airport near one of the car rental counters.

He went over and assisted the man, who turned out to be Retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Dennis Ridnouer, who lives in North Carolina.

“He tried to speak and went back out and quit breathing,” Fricke said. “I called for help and I checked his carotid.”

Des Moines police officers Jaime Vanderwert, Vic Gamboa, and Eric Wilson arrived on the scene with a defibrillator, according to Deb Mercer, an employee with the city of Melbourne.

“We feel he should be honored,” she said.

The defibrillator was activated and it worked.

Ridnouer eventually regained consciousness and was transported by ambulance to a Des Moines hospital.

Fricke did not really have a chance to think about what he was doing.

“I just kind of was like ‘Hey, I’ve got to do something.’ I can’t just stand around while this guy lays here and is not breathing’” he said. “The training just kind of kicked in.”

“I thought ‘Oh boy,’ your chances of saving someone - I have been a first responder for 19 years and you very seldom save a guy,” he said. “When I saw they had a defibrillator, there was a lot better chance.”

Fricke said the scene was quite stressful, especially for Ridnouer’s wife, who had left him at the counter to take care of some luggage. When she turned the corner and saw him on the floor, “she kind of lost it but calmed down and was able to give them information about his medical history.”

Ridnouer had a pacemaker put in and is alive today.

“It was a team effort on everyone’s part,” Fricke said. “I’m just glad I was able to help.”

A T.G.I. Friday’s employee is being credited for saving the life of a traveler at Pittsburgh International Airport.

Brad Dougherty the Saviour

Brad Dougherty was quick to react when a man collapsed on the airside moving walkway.

Dougherty grabbed a nearby defibrillator and helped keep the man alive until paramedics arrived.

“I had an experience like this about a month before. I lost somebody doing CPR. They didn’t make it — at a Sunoco — so I actually got a chance at redemption,” said Dougherty.

The man Dougherty revived was reported to be doing well at a local hospital.

Their vacation was over, and Joseph Oginski and his family were waiting at Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers for the flight home to Great Neck on July 4.

Joseph Oginski the Saviour

Suddenly, a gate attendant screamed, “There’s someone down!” Oginski looked at his father, Gerry, then rushed over, announcing, “I’m a firefighter and first responder. Can I help you?”

The 75-year-old victim was turning blue with no pulse or signs of breathing when Oginski, 17, a newly minted firefighter with the Great Neck Vigilant Fire Company, reached him.

Trained in CPR, Oginski asked a port authority officer for a pocket face mask to administer rescue breaths and advised the gate attendant to begin chest compressions

Five minutes later, another officer arrived with an automatic external defibrillator.

When the defibrillator was in place, Joseph used the equipment to shock the man, who did not respond. He resumed the rescue breathing and chest compressions, followed by another shock.

In all, it took three jolts from the defibrillator and continuing CPR maneuvers to restore breath and a pulse to the gentleman.

Oginski said, “I kept looking up at the man’s wife…she was my inspiration to keep going…keep trying. I was so ecstatic when I saw color come back into his face.”

The team used the device to restore the man’s pulse, and he started breathing on his own.

Two medical crews arrived shortly after to take over, Oginski said.

“I was happy after working on him, and it made me feel good to know that everything I’d learned and put to use was successful.”

“The feeling was incredible watching my son help save a life,” said Gerry Oginski, 45, a lawyer.

“My wife and I felt so proud to see his training kick in automatically, and to see him take charge of a medical emergency in such a calm and professional manner.”

“He’s a good kid, a good firefighter,” said Great Neck Vigilant First Deputy Chief Mark Meade. “He knows what to do without losing his head, and experienced enough to know what to do.”

We will be reporting on lives saved around the world since our first documented life saved here in Singapore.

Shortly before 1 p.m., several travelers gathered at a Southwest Airlines gate waiting to board a plane to Nashville when one of the passengers, a man in his 50s, collapsed and appeared to suffer a seizure.

A flight attendant grabbed a defibrillator from the plane and handed it to Gamez who immediately began to operate the life-saving device.

Gamez, a 25-year Chicago police veteran who’s assigned to Midway, also began CPR along with a doctor who was at the gate. Gamez then used shock paddles to help revive him, just one week after the officer received the training on how to operate a defibrillator.

The man was taken to a local hospital where he was listed in stable condition and undergoing further treatment, police said.

We will be reporting on lives saved around the world since our first documented life saved here in Singapore.

When Gary Terry, a former telecommunications executive called it quits after a 32-year career, he took up an equally time-consuming volunteer job as chairman of the American Heart Association’s Texas chapter.

“I was trying to get back to the metroplex because I had a meeting the next morning. I reached down to pick up my briefcase, and I kept going.”

Here’s where the story takes an ironic twist: Gary Terry collapsed just 18 feet from an automated external defibrillator AED that he and his group — the American Heart Association — helped to install just eight months earlier.

But the circumstances of Terry’s experience are unique, because there was a defibrillator nearby, and somebody knew how to use it.

“I think this is part of the plan, and I think he wants me to keep telling people what a great piece of equipment the AED is.”

“I’m gonna try to put AEDs in every building and in every house, and then I’m gonna hang them on trees.”

We will be reporting on lives saved around the world since our first documented life saved here in Singapore.

“He was on the ground, blue and not moving, not responsive,” recalls Ms Schmitt, a nurse and also a fellow passenger at the airport. “I just kept doing (CPR); I didn’t look around. I just did what I had to do, what I was trained to do. I was so happy when the police officer showed up with (a defibrillator),” she says.

She continued performing CPR as the police officer twice shocked Mr Pangle, the businessman with the defibrillator. By the time EMS ( paramedis ) arrived, Pangle had a pulse, although he was still unconscious.

“It makes me feel really good that he survived. I’m so happy he made it through,” Ms Schmitt says.

“It was emotional coming in and knowing that these are the people that saved my life and without them I’m not here. So it’s very emotional.” Mr Pangle says.