First Aid Corps

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

John McCloskey (left) with Virginia Fulbright the Saviour

When McCloskey’s heart stopped last summer, the circumstances surrounding his near-death couldn’t have fallen into place much better than they did

For starters, the 76-year-old High Point man nearly had stayed home on July 16, 2008, before deciding at the last minute to join his wife, Rosalie, on a visit to see their grandson.

“If I had stayed home, I would’ve been gone,” McCloskey says matter-of-factly.

Second, McCloskey almost forgot his sunglasses. As he headed back into the house to retrieve them, Rosalie suggested, “OK, I’ll drive.” Had he been driving – which would’ve been the norm – both of them could’ve died when his heart stopped.

And third, when McCloskey slumped over in the front passenger seat, Rosalie just happened to be driving by Deep River Family Medicine on Premier Drive, so she hastily pulled into the parking lot and ran into the office yelling for help.

At that moment, physician assistant Virginia Fulbright emerged from a patient examing room and heard the cries for help. She instructed the office staff to call 911, then ran out to the parking lot, where she found McCloskey still slumped over in his seat.

“He was not breathing, and he didn’t have any heartbeat,” Fulbright recalls. “I sent some of the staff inside to get the emergency equipment, and a couple of people helped me pull him out of the car and put him on the ground, so I could start doing CPR.”

There was one other thing working in McCloskey’s favor: Fulbright had access to – and knew how to use – a defibrillator, an electrical device that can shock the heart back into its normal rhythm.

She immediately shocked him and restarted chest compressions. After checking again for a pulse – and finding none – she shocked him again and continued with more chest compressions.

Just as paramedics arrived on the scene, McCloskey started having some spontaneous breathing, and his heart had begun beating again. Paramedics swiftly loaded the patient onto the ambulance and transported him to the hospital, where he made a gradual recovery.

Fulbright says she was “flabbergasted” to see McCloskey start breathing again.

Fulbright says she was “flabbergasted” to see McCloskey start breathing again.

“Apparently, I was clinically dead for about five minutes, but Virginia kept working on me,” McCloskey says. “I call her “my angel without wings.’”

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

Kim Blake the Saviour

A customer came into the store a little after 4 p.m. that day and told workers that another customer, a 52-year-old Renton man, had fallen to the ground of the parking lot. 

Sharina Brock, another McLendon Hardware Store’s manager, rushed out to the parking lot and returned inside, where she announced that the man wasn’t breathing.

Blake, trained in CPR, grabbed the store’s Automated External Defibrillator (AED) and attached it to the fallen man. The laptop-sized machine jolted the man’s heart back to life, and Blake then performed CPR on him until Renton Fire and Emergency Services Department arrived.

“It felt like an hour and a half, but I bet you it was maybe five minutes,” Blake says of how long she performed CPR on the man.

She says it took another 45 minutes to get the man’s heart beating on its own.

Staff from Renton Fire and Emergency Services Department told Blake that the man would not have survived without the shock provided by the AED. Blake attached the AED to the man about two minutes after he collapsed.

Blake burst into tears when the Renton firefighters told her they had found a pulse on the man.

They asked me ‘How does it feel to save a life?’ and I just lost it,” she recalls.

“Even having a baby, this was probably the most tense experience I’ve ever had,” she added.

Blake doesn’t know the name of the man she saved. All she knows is that he was 52 at the time and that he is alive. His mom called McLendon’s from Tennessee to deliver that good news.

He was saved by an AED purchased with $10,000 donated.

“I was actually kind of laughing when we got it,” Blake confesses. “Like what are the odds we’re going to have to use it? And tada!”

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

Adam Davis and Cindy Rossi, with the AED

An 87-year-old Jonesboro man was in the right place at the right time, and now he will be able to celebrate the holidays with his family and friends.

Just before 2 p.m., three days before Thanksgiving, Carlton Look was experiencing chest pains and went to Dr. David Rioux’s medical office, where staff told him to go directly to the emergency room at Down East Community Hospital because Rioux was not in.

Look and his wife, Lenita left the office, and Lenita returned to say that Carlton had passed out.

At about the same time, Washington County Regional Communication Center dispatcher Adam Davis, who also is a part-time deputy, had just come out of the doctor’s office. He was there with his son to see his son’s pediatrician. When Davis went to his vehicle, he saw Look slumped forward in his vehicle.

“At first I didn’t know if he was asleep,” Davis said Monday. “I went to go around the truck, and all kinds of people came running out of the doctor’s office.”

Jill McDonald, a registered nurse, checked Look and found no pulse. She also noted he was not breathing.

McDonald and Theresa Parent, a nurse at the hospital, were able to get Look out of his vehicle and started cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Physician’s assistant Alf Wakeman and pediatrician Dr. Richard Gibbs joined them.

“I asked if they had an AED [automatic external defibrillator],” Davis said. Farren brought one from the doctor’s office.

Davis told the medical staff that he had recently been recertified in the use of a defibrillator. They told him to set it up, while they continued CPR. It was the first time he had used it on a person, he said.

There was no question that the medical staff knew how to use the defibrillator, but they were busy administering CPR, Mike Hinerman, director of the Washington County Emergency Management Agency, said Monday.

“Adam was free to set the AED up.”

Once the machine was hooked up to Look, its instruments indicated to Davis that the patient needed to be shocked.

One shock by the machine did it, and Look regained a pulse.

“They had a pulse monitor out there; he had an almost normal pulse by that point,” Davis said.

An ambulance took Look to the Machias hospital.

Carlton not only had a pulse, but he was actually talking at the [emergency room] in Machias.

Rossi said she was proud of Davis. “It takes an unselfish person to respond and do this type of thing,” she said.