West Thurston Fire pose after being given heart-shaped pins.
West Thurston Firefighter Garrett Broumley receives his heart-shaped pin.
West Thurston Regional Fire Authority celebrated a life saved Friday by passing around heart pins to put on their shirts and gathering to pose for a picture.
They publicized the celebration on their Facebook page and also took the time to tell the public about the extensive opportunities West Thurston Fire offers to learn about CPR. They plugged the educational opportunities for one life-saving reason: the casual bystander is commonly the first line of defense in a cardiac arrest incident.
And it was a casual bystander who deserves a share of the credit for saving the man’s life, Captain and EMS officer Lanette Dyer says.
“We’re not really anything at the end of the day if we don’t have a patient who has already had good CPR done on them,” Dyer said. “All the fancy equipment, all the drugs and all the AED in the world doesn’t mean anything if good CPR wasn’t done by citizens who were trying to make a difference.”
On January 31, the West Thurston RFA received a report about a man at a gas station near exit 88 on I-5 who collapsed to the ground in the parking lot.
“He had basically taken kind of a header and he had fallen to the ground,” Dyer said. “A bystander had seen the guy taking a header and then somebody else went inside and called 911.”
According to Thurston County dispatcher Krista Thrift, one bystander was on the line getting CPR advice from her and then would relay the info to the person performing CPR.
“I was honestly surprised the people were so eager to help,” Thrift said. “Usually people are pretty timid in these situations, but it sounded like there was a crowd of people there to help.”
Though the bystander helping the man had taken CPR classes in the past, Thrift assisted by making sure he was maintaining a good speed with each chest compression. Dyer, along with the rest of West Thurston Fire, listened in to the bystander save a man’s life on the dispatch they had recorded.
“It was just phenomenal,” Dyer said. “You know, there are just times and moments in your life where a plan comes together. … The dispatcher was there making sure the speed and everything was right and the plan came together. And so by the time we got there we had a viable patient to work on.”
It is moments like these that make Dyer proud of her department’s work, she said, but was also eager to make the public aware that it could be themselves standing in that bystander’s shoes being asked to save a man’s life. If that moment ever comes, it is best to be prepared.
The classes they teach are for free and are also taught by Thurston County Medic One. The class does not make you CPR certified, which requires a lengthier eight-hour course, but gives you the details necessary to perform CPR. They provide a mannequin to practice on in each two-hour session.
Class schedules are available at Thurston County Medic One’s website at www.thurstoncountywa.gov/m1/Pages/default.aspx or you can call West Thurston RFA to schedule a class at 360-352-1614.
Currently the man, whose name was not released, is still rehabbing at a local hospital, but West Thurston Fire intends to have a gathering for the man, the bystander who administered CPR and the dispatcher who guided the bystander through it to have a more formal meeting when he is out of the hospital.
