26. I saved a man’s life. I found my old list of “100 things about me you didn’t know” and I’ll probably use a lot of that for this list. Anyways, yes, it’s true, I (and a coworker) saved a man’s life. Many would attribute it to me, but I don’t think so, I was just in the right place at the right time. I’ll paint the picture for you. Imagine…
I’m outside the Acute Care Clinic (ACC), and yes, I was smoking. It was about 6:30 in the morning. I was just getting done with 24 hour duty, having slept all night in the ACC. Suddenly, I hear a marine yell out, “Man down! Man down!” and with amazing speed (which surprised me!) I looked around and saw a group of marines in the nearby softball field all gathered around someone. I quickly opened the door to the ACC and yelled to the first person I saw, “there’s a marine down out here, I’ll need help!” and so we both ran out into the field to see exactly what was going on.
When we got through the crowd of marines, we finally saw that a Top Gunny had suddently collapsed right after they had gotten here from jogging. My coworker slapped him around, and asked him, “Are you ok? Hello?” What happened next is one thing that I’ll never forget for the rest of my life, I think. A marine, in the whiniest voice said, “No, doc, of course he’s not ok!” I think I just about thought I was going to burst laughing, but you know, that would be too insensitive. Later, my coworker admitted he wanted to laugh too. But please realize, the first thing we learn is that you have to determine LOC (Level of Consciousness) when you get into a situation like this. Of course we knew he wasn’t going to answer. He was in cardiac arrest. His heart stopped pumping. So immediately, we ordered the marines to gently lift him and bring him in the ACC.
From there, it was all typical hospital stuff. We managed to revive the Top and he was just fine after that. There’s a bit more to this part of the story, but no one wants to hear about the crazy things that happen while you’re doing chest compressions. A bit of cardiac care and he was off to spend many more years of life. For a while, we were the talk of the town, until someone else was saved or some other tragedy happened. But I will never forget what the doctor said about that day. “If it wasn’t for that smoking corpsman, he would have never made it.” While I’m not saying it was a good thing that I smoked at the time, I just got the warm fuzzies thinking that I made a difference in someone else’s life.
Pretty neat huh? Yeah I don’t like to talk about it much, since you know, I didn’t do anything really spectacular per se. It almost seemed like I was someone else that day, but at the same time it was me. That wasn’t the first time I ever had to do CPR or run through a code, but it was one of my memorable ones.
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