Call9 Volunteer EMTs Help to Save the Life of a Fellow EMT
At Call9, the emergency-trained first responders who work on-site in our partner nursing homes share stories on a daily basis of the complex patients they work with and the lives they’re able to save.
But it’s not everyday that we hear stories of staff in our Brooklyn HQ who had the same privilege.
This past February, Chris Faherty, Call9’s Head of Growth and also the Assist Chief of Little Silver EMS, and Katie Davis, Acute Care Nurse Practitioner and Call9’s SVP of Clinical Ops, were dispatched to a car dealership for a 63-year-old employee believed to be not breathing. When Chris, Katie and fellow volunteer Mike Very, Chief & Paramedic with Jersey City EMS, arrived, they found a patient — Jeff — collapsed in the service department in cardiac arrest.
As they took over CPR from a bystander, they immediately defibrillated Jeff with an automated external defibrillator (AED). Shortly thereafter, with agonal respirations and a weak pulse, Jeff went into cardiac arrest for a second time. The local paramedic team arrived and found Jeff to be in ventricular fibrillation, requiring a second defibrillation and a medication called amiodarone. With a then bradycardic (slow) heartbeat, the team quickly began cardiac pacing Jeff, allowing him to regain partial consciousness and even begin speaking to Chris.
They worked to manage Jeff’s pain caused by the pacing and quickly moved him to the ambulance. Jeff went into cardiac arrest three more times during transport to the hospital, each time regaining pulses after CPR (interesting medical fact: push dose epinephrine was needed only during and after two failed intubation attempts). The EMS crew ultimately decided to transport Jeff to a different hospital further away, knowing he needed definitive treatment to unclog blocked arteries in his heart. They called ahead to reach the on-call interventional cardiologist and were able to convince him to return to the hospital in anticipation of Jeff’s need for immediate cardiac catheterization.
[Quick editorial pause here: for the non-medical folks out there, the biggest takeaway from the paragraph above is that Jeff went into cardiac arrest four times in 20 minutes before arriving at the hospital. Wow.]
Jeff was ultimately diagnosed with a near 100% occlusion of his right coronary artery. With three coronary stents, five days in the ICU and a rehab facility stay, he is back to work full time. Today he has returned to normal life with his family and has made a full recovery.
Chris, Katie, Mike, and everyone else that helped Jeff had the amazing opportunity meet him recently on a warm summer night in August — and to their great surprise, they learned for the first time that Jeff is the Chief of Freehold Volunteer EMS in NJ, and his son is a career paramedic for MONOC (the first CAAS certified ambulance company in NJ)!
Jeff overcame a survival rate of <1% and is already back on the ambulance volunteering his time to help others.
