She helped save a man’s life after he collapsed during a hockey game, but Rose Wood chalked it up to a defibrillator and team work.
View First Aid Corps World Map of AED Locations in a larger map
“My best friend is there on that wall,” the fitness instructor said, pointing to the defibrillator hanging outside the community arenas at the WFCU Centre where she teaches fitness classes and staffs the reception desk.
Rose Wood the Saviour
On Friday at around 8 p.m., she was at the desk when a man ran out of a pickup hockey game telling her to call 911. Another player had collapsed on his way off the ice.
Right away, Wood’s safety training and her people-organizing skills kicked in.
“It was a team effort,” the 54-year-old grandmother of four boys said.
She instructed the other desker to call an ambulance, grabbed the defibrillator off the wall, rushed into the arena to where the man — who she can only describe as in his 40s and little heavy — was lying on the black rubber floor.
“I just did it,” Wood said, describing how she got down on the ground, shouted for help to get the man’s hockey jersey off, and asked a woman nearby to help her put the defibrillator pads on the man’s chest and under his right arm.
The other 20 or so people were told to stand back when she pressed the button on the defibrillator to release the electric charge.
“He jumped,” Wood said about the shock sent to the man’s heart. “I had never seen that before.”
She gave mouth-to-mouth while she instructed the woman nearby — whom Wood said she did not recognize, but would like to thank for her help — to do chest compressions on the man.
“It seemed like hours,” Wood said. “I yelled, ‘Where is that ambulance?’”
One player was posted to the arena entrance to hail the ambulance, a second was given the task of clearing a path in the crowd for the paramedics, and a third was told to help emergency workers cross the ice safely.
Doug Sweet, who manages the arena, said he could not confirm who the man was or where he was taken to hospital, but he said he believed he was taken to a hospital in Detroit.
“We know he’s doing well,” Sweet said, adding that all the staff are very proud of how Wood managed the situation.
“I just bawled my eyes out,” Wood said, describing her reaction once the paramedics took over. “I couldn’t stop,” she said, adding that she was still shaking a little on Monday night.
Wood regularly goes through safety training as a fitness instructor, but she has never had to put her skills into practice in real life, she said, despite having worked in this field since 1987.
“I never want to do it again, but if I have to, I have no qualms,” she said. In fact, she added jokingly, she wants to find out just how long the whole process took so that if she has to do it again, she can beat her time.
Wood joked that the defibrillator is the real hero of the story and thinks she might give the little machine a name, but the experience has made her more aware of where defibrillators are in public places, whether it’s at the mall where she was running errands on the weekend, or at the arena where her grandchildren play hockey in Belle River.
The arena has eight defibrillators, Sweet said, adding that since it opened, there have been six heart attacks.
With thousands of people attending games and playing games each night, he said, it’s almost inevitable one will happen at some point, but thanks to the defibrillators and trained staff, the arena is prepared for this type of emergency.
The staff are trained annually in CPR and defibrillator use and undergo quarterly emergency training.
“Everybody in these situations works as a team,” Sweet said.
