First Aid Corps

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.”

The 55-year-old male, who goes to the Brock University’s faculty of education campus in Hamilton, was at the Glenridge Avenue campus playing an intramural basketball game when he collapsed about 8:15 p.m.

People nearby rushed to the man’s aid and used one of the school’s automated external defibrillators to deliver an electric shock to restart the victim’s heart.

The man’s son and his girlfriend helped administer CPR until paramedics arrived.

He can’t recall the first man’s name, but Etobicoke hockey arena senior operator Art Jones said “he’s back playing hockey” and they regularly chat.

Art Jones the Saviour

“He just went down on the ice, but a couple of the guys are city workers and realized what was happening,” he said.

Doug Clancy, then manager of an arena at Erindale College, joined him doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but they feared “we were going to lose him.”

Jones, who trained on the defibrillator about one month earlier, fetched the portable unit and got the victim’s heart beating with one jolt before paramedics arrived.

“I was at the other end of the lobby with my partner, Marco, and I just said ‘call 911′ and we started running and I grabbed the defibrillator and in I went,” he said, noting the arena has two public access defibrillators on-site for such incidents.

When Jones arrived at the scene, he found a 52-year-old regular named Wally down on the ice - unconscious, but still breathing.

“When I got over to (Wally) I started pulling out the unit and got his shirt up just in case he went down and, sure enough, he started going blue and stopped breathing. I had to slap the pads on his chest and hit him with a jolt,” Jones recalled.

With just the one reviving jolt, Wally’s eyes fluttered, his heart restarted and he was breathing again, albeit with laboured breaths, Jones said.

Friends were preparing to do mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions Thursday, but Jones intervened. “He’s going to be okay,” he said.

Grateful at the recognition, especially from arena regulars, he stressed “it’s important for people to realize the units are there, and to get training. Seconds count. If you can save a life, that’s what it’s all about.”

Ryan Smith, 18, suffered a heart attack while at a local handball court in December.

His best friend proceeded to call 9-1-1.

A man apparently saw the incident transpire and rushed over to perform CPR on Smith before three EMTs arrived.

“If it wouldn’t have been for that person and the police officers and the people from the ambulance, then he would have had brain damage,” said Smith’s father, Nelson Arroyo.

Now, both Smith and his father want thank this Good Samaritan.

“He just came, did what he did and disappeared. Whoever he was, he saved my life. Thank you for that,” said Smith.

EMTs needed a defibrillator to start Smith’s heart.

“I’m happy this kid was able to make it through because of these two people before us, and we just showed up and did our job. That’s all we did,” said Chris Leavitt, an EMT with Patriot Ambulance.

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.”

77-year-old Robert Monson was behind the wheel of a car that went out of control, clipped another car, crossed into oncoming traffic and slammed into a guardrail on County Road J near Interstate 35E. He had pulled out of the White Bear Township 17 Theatre parking lot, tried to turn and suffered the heart attack about 9:10 p.m..

A handful of good Samaritans who pulled him out of his car, laid him on the street and performed CPR as they waited for an ambulance.

“Myself and the fire department, we’re doing the job we’re trained to do,” said Deputy Rob Wilkinson, the first police officer or rescue worker to arrive at the scene.

“Those good Samaritans didn’t have to stop and help, and they did. He owes his life to ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

Robert Monson was lying on his back unconscious, eyes wide open but not breathing and without a heartbeat, when Wilkinson and his partner arrived at the scene.

“I knew it was a critical situation,” Wilkinson said

Two men were performing CPR. Wilkinson asked a third bystander to hold a flashlight and another to start setting up oxygen, and then the deputy used an automated external defibrillator shock to the man’s chest.

“The defibrillator analyzed his heart rhythm, advised a shock. It (defibrillator) prompted me to shock him so I pressed the button, shocked him and he suddenly began gasping for air and was restored to somewhat of a normal cardiac rhythm,” Wilkinson said.

Monson immediately gasped for air.

“You could hear the gasping, it was amazing,” Mason said.

An ambulance arrived, and he was loaded in and shocked a second time before being transported to United Hospital in St. Paul, where he remained in the intensive care unit Sunday night.

“They were so good, the response was wonderful,” said Barbara Monson, who said Sunday night she tried to perform CPR on her husband in the vehicle before having to run out and flag people down. “I just flagged them down. … We were lucky the movie was just letting out and another one was starting.”

Wilkinson said the good Samaritans were vital in extending the window of time for the driver’s survival.

“The credit really goes to them,” Wilkinson said. “What they did enabled me to do what I did to save him. It’s a textbook case of what should happen when someone has a cardiac emergency.”

“It’s great to know that people out there care,” Monson said.

“I feel very very lucky, we’ve been married for 55 years, we’ve had a very good marriage, best friends, get along great,” Monson said.

Heidi Bonnell, 36, a well-known Ottawa lobbyist and worked as an aide to former Liberal cabinet minister Brian Tobin, said she was riding a stationary bike at the Ottawa-Vanier Goodlife club when she went into full cardiac arrest.

Heidi Bonnell the Survivor

“The staff helped me get off the bike while another woman working out at the facility found a nurse in an exercise class down the way who had any sort of CPR or medical training,” said Bonnell.

By the time paramedics arrived, Bonnell still did not have a pulse and needed to be shocked with a defibrillator.

After spending three weeks in hospital — five of those days on ice, Bonnell was able to return home on Nov. 28

A woman jogging alone through a quiet tree-lined neighborhood collapses, face-first, onto the ground.

Seeing the woman face-down in the grass, Blantz pulled a U-turn, jumped out of his car, found her unresponsive, called 911, rolled her on her back and began CPR.

Another jogger had stopped to help while Blantz was on the phone with emergency dispatchers. Blantz handed him the phone and began CPR.

He continued chest compressions as medics arrived less than a minute later and took over respiration.

The EMTs then used an automated external defibrillator to start the woman’s pulse again.

The jogger was taken to the hospital, where she remained unconscious — and unidentified — until Tuesday, when she awoke and was able to provide police with her mother’s name.

“I want her family to know,” Blantz said, “that individuals were there, that a complete stranger is willing to jump in and help at a moment’s notice and not expect anything from anybody.”

“I feel I did my duty in helping another citizen,” Blantz said.

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.”

At 12:48 p.m. Wednesday, a 911 called reported an unconscious person at the Pickwick Restaurant, 1 S. Prospect Ave., in Park Ridge, according to a release from Park Ridge police.

Lars Larsen the Survivor and His Saviours

Emergency crews responded including Officer David Cacioppo who came into the eatery with his automated external defibrillator.

Inside, a 51-year-old man was on the floor in full cardiac arrest with two bystanders performing CPR, according to the release.

“When I walked in, I had them continue CPR, then I put the pads on and got the AED ready,” Cacioppo said, who has been certified in CPR and in the use of AED since 2001.

“Once it recommended a shock, I made sure no one was touching the gentleman, and I then I shocked him. Then I continued with chest compressions.” Cacioppo said.

After it was determined no further shocks were needed, Cacioppo began to perform chest compressions on the man as paramedics from the Park Ridge Fire Department arrived, according to the release.

Cacioppo, along with officer Karen Suarez, assisted the paramedics, who took the man to Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, where he was in “stable’ condition in the intensive care unit late Thursday, according to the release.

Jeanne Orlowski, a Pickwick waitress, identified the man as Lars Larsen, someone she called “our ultimate regular customer” due to his frequent dining at the restaurant.

“There was a great effort put forward by everybody, from the people administering CPR prior to me getting there, to my part, to the Fire Department taking over at that point, all the way to the staff at the ER and what they had to do to stabilize the gentleman,” Cacioppo said. “It was a good outcome based on the fact that everything was in place from the start.”