Susan Angell would have died on the floor of the produce section at Target if it weren’t for Curtis Russell.
“The last thing I remember, I picked up an apple, and I was looking at it, and I thought, ‘I’m going to faint,’ ” said Angell, 59, whose heart stopped beating for a few minutes on April 25.
Her next memory is waking up in an ambulance, and a paramedic telling her a police officer had saved her life.
Russell, the West Des Moines police officer, was on patrol north of the West Glen Target when someone at the store called 911. Russell was in his second week on solo patrol.
“I was just driving around, and I was probably a quarter-mile away when I got tripped to go there,” Russell, 24, said.
He flipped on the lights and siren, and started going over in his mind how he would use the automatic external defibrillator in his patrol car.
Somebody from the store waved him into the east entrance, and he found Angell on the floor, surrounded by 15 or 20 people.
He knelt next to her and used the defibrillator to monitor her heart rhythm. A nurse was with Angell, and told Russell they hadn’t been able to find a pulse for two minutes. The defibrillator then signalled Russell to administer the shock.
“Right when it said ‘shock advised,’ that’s when the medics ran in,” Russell said.
He pressed the red button, and then did two sets of compressions, pushing on her sternum.
“Like a snap she woke up and said ‘Ow!’ kind of like she was dreaming,” Russell said.
Paramedics put her on a stretcher, and rolled her out to the ambulance.
“It never really hit me until one of the medics looked over and she said, ‘Great job,’ ” Russell said. “I was kind of in the zone, but then it came back to reality.”
He had saved the life of a mom, a friend. Angell, who lives in south Des Moines, is a retired teacher. She taught French at Lincoln High School for 25 years.
“I’m so grateful to him,” she said of Russell.
