_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [108]
Quickly he began CPR, pumping my chest and blowing air into my lungs, and he would later tell me I coughed, tried to breathe on my own. But there was no luck. The breathing stopped again. Frank turned, looking for help. “Call the Rescue Squad,” he shouted to passersby.
One block north, Pat Sullivan, a college student, was at work at the restaurant Coconuts. He was carrying supplies into the dining room when he noticed the small group of people standing around my body.
“What’s going on down there?” he yelled to a man on the beach.
“It looks like a drowning to me,” the man replied.
Sullivan turned to his fellow workers. “Any of you know CPR?”
None responded.
He quickly ran the block to where David Frank was on his knees.
He stared at my lifeless body and froze. “My God,” he shouted. “It’s Mr. Barbree.”
“You know him?” David Frank asked.
“I sure do,” the young man responded. “His daughter Karla and I are friends,” he said as he turned and pointed. “They live right up there, that house on the ocean.”
My attempted revival was taking place within the shadows of the Park Place Condominiums. There, Debi Hall was busy preparing dinner, annoyed with her detective husband for leaving the police radio on. The constant 10–4s and law-enforcement chatter were getting on her nerves.
She paid scant attention to the call that a man was down on the beach and the Rescue Squad was rolling, until she heard the location. Then she ran to the balcony, looked down, and saw two men working on a lifeless body.
On her way out the door, she stopped only long enough to turn off the stove.
Debi Hall had been trained as an emergency medical technician to react quickly to any life-threatening situation. Her job was to take care of workers on the nation’s spaceport, including the astronauts.
Within seconds she was on the beach, moving Pat Sullivan and David Frank aside. First she checked for my pulse. There was none. Then she resumed CPR. She knew it was critical to keep oxygen and blood moving to the brain and other vital organs.
She completed her first sequence and shouted in my ear. “Don’t go to the light! Don’t go to the light! You’re gonna be all right.”
She kept the rhythm going tirelessly. “Where the hell is that Rescue Squad?” she yelled.
Ed Clemons and Lee Proctor were busy with firehouse maintenance duties when the call came in. They both stopped and looked at each other. Clemons, a paramedic, had seen it all too often before, and the outcome was all too predictable. But they had to do what they could. Once in a great while they did get lucky, and maybe this call would be the rarity.
One thing in my favor? I was lucky enough to drop dead within a block of the Cocoa Beach Fire Station and the city’s Rescue Squad.
The rescue unit screamed out of the firehouse and headed for the beach. Clemons hit the ground first.
He stared at me dressed in jogging shoes, dry shorts, and a shirt wet with sweat. “This guy didn’t drown,” he protested to his partner. “He’s a jogger.”
“That’s right,” Debi Hall told them. “He went into v-fib while jogging.”
Her eyes darted back and forth between the two firemen. “Did you bring a defib pack?”
“No,” Clemons said. “The ambulance is on its way with that gear.”
He read the disgust in Debi’s face but let it pass. He and Proctor took over, first checking for a pulse. It still wasn’t there.
“Don’t go to the light,” Debi screamed again in my ear. “Stay here with us.”
“What’s wrong with this woman?” Clemons mumbled as he instructed his partner, Proctor, to resume CPR chest compressions, manually moving the blood through my stilled heart into my lungs to pick up the fresh oxygen and send it to my brain and other organs.
My color began to return and occasionally I would attempt to breathe, what medical people call agonal respiration.
The rescue work continued until the ambulance arrived with the defibrillators.
Emergency medical technician