C.P.R.

June 21, 2011

Started out like any normal day. It was the first day of training our new pharmacist at the pharmacy. At some point during the day I hear a checker come on the loud speaker and ask for the manager to come to the front of the store for an emergency. I thought there was some sort of theft or something so I continued on working. About ten minutes later, the GM manager came running back to the pharmacy and told me they had a lady out in the parking lot that needed CPR. My adrenaline started pumping immediately and I grabbed some rubber gloves, a mask (because that was all I could think of to use as a cover for mouth to mouth) and ran out the door telling the other pharmacist to come out with me. We got out to the parking lot to find an elderly woman lying on her back on the ground, half way under the passenger side of her car. There was several people out there already, some employees, some bystanders and the lady's daughter. One employee had 911 on the phone. I got down and felt for a pulse and looked for breaths. Neither were present. She was a grayish color and completely lifeless. I could look into her eyes and see that there was nothing there. I don't know how long she had been out there but it had been a while. It just happened that I kneeled down by her side so I started compressions. I have had CPR training back when I was in school but I have never done it in real life, and it was crazy to me how similiar it felt on a human to a dummy. After the compressions were done the other pharmacist cut a small hole in the medical mask that we had and did 2 breaths. I continued to do compressions. After a few rounds, some stuff started to come up out of her mouth and you could just sense that she was trying to breath but nothing was happening yet. A few more rounds and the ambulance showed up. They had me continue with compressions while they prepared their equipment and set her up on oxygen and a pump to do the breaths. After many rounds of compressions and breaths, there was still no pulse and no breathing. She was in really bad shape. The EMT's had some suction device and were able to get some more stuff out of her throat. The next task was trying to move her from beneath the car and get her into the ambulance. I don't think people realize how hard it is to move an overweight individual when they are lifeless, nor do I think people realize how not gentle people are when they are trying to move someone in a hurry to save their life. It took many adult men and some female EMT's to get her onto the bed to be moved into the ambulance. They took her off pretty quickly after that but she still had no pulse and was not breathing on her own. I went back in to the pharmacy wondering if what I had done had made a difference. Also wondering if I had done everything I could have done and done it properly. I felt more at peace this time around than the first time when I had to help a guy who had passed out and started seizing down the dairy isle. However, I had no clue whether this lady was going to live through this, it didn't look good for her even when she left. A few hours after the incident an officer at the scene came in to the pharmacy to tell me that when the lady arrived at the hospital they pulled a food mass the size of a small taco out of her throat. Apparently the lady and her daughter had gone to a fast food joint to get food and then stopped by the store for some groceries. The daughter ran in to pick up a few things and when she got outside her mother was hunched in the car not breathing. That's when the call went out to the store manager. She must have fallen out of the car when the daughter opened the door. A man there at the time started doing CPR but I was told he probably wasn't pushing down hard enough to get the job done. That's when I came. After she went to the hospital and the food was extracted from her throat, she was transferred by life flight to a hospital in Salt Lake. Days went by and I never heard anything about her. I kept checking the obituaries to see if she had passed away but didn't ever see her. After several weeks of checking I had a pretty good idea that she had not died, because I'm sure I would have heard about it. Finally over a month after the event, the officer came back into the pharmacy and told me that the lady did make it through it and she was alive and well in a rehab facility in town. The officer had gone by to visit her. He told me that we did a really good job and that in all his years of being a police officer he had never seen a session of CPR turn out positively with a patient alive at the end. It made me feel really good! I'm so glad that she is doing well!

The day after the incident I went on a mission to get our store a first aid kit that is all-inclusive. It has everything you could ever imagine! One of the more important items being a CPR mask. At least now I will feel better prepared if I ever have to do this again.