EAST MILLINOCKET — A 55-year-old cardiac arrest victim is alive thanks to quick action by the man’s friends and town emergency responders on Tuesday night, officials said.
The man from Dover-Foxcroft, who asked that his name not be used, had been suffering chest pains a few minutes earlier as the vehicle approached Main Street near the former paper mill site, Karl Cousins recalled. Earlier the man had vomited and suffered from cold sweats, and Karl and Leon Cousins, thinking he might have a stomach flu, were taking him to his home.
That’s when things went dangerously wrong.
“He brought both of his fists up to his chest and almost went into a seizure,” Karl Cousins said. “He was speechless and having trouble breathing. My brother started screaming in the back something like, ‘You need to get help now.’”
Cousins immediately turned toward the public safety building, which is about three-tenths of a mile west of the mill.
Part-time police officer and emergency medical technician Seth Burnes was the first to aid the man after the Cousins brothers pulled their car into the public safety building’s parking lot at about 9:15 p.m.
“When I got out to the car, he was in full cardiac arrest, wasn’t breathing and didn’t have a pulse,” Burnes said.
Burnes grabbed the victim by his torso and Karl Cousins took his legs as they pulled the man from the car and laid him down on the parking lot. Burnes immediately began performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation and was joined within a minute or two by several emergency responders, including paramedic Anthony White, who had a defibrillator.
The man took two defibrillator treatments before his pulse, and then his breathing, resumed, Burnes said. An East Millinocket ambulance took the man to Millinocket Regional Hospital, where he was stabilized.
A LifeFlight helicopter flew the man to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor early Wednesday morning, Cousins said. He added that the man is recovering.
“He seems very good. His speech is good. The only thing he has got (to worry about) is he was a smoker,” Cousins said.
Burnes, who works for G & H Ambulance Inc. of Glenburn, has administered CPR as many as 15 times in a dozen years. He said the man was his first save.
“It wasn’t all me. There were many people who played equally as important, if not more important, roles in this as I did,” Burnes said Saturday.
He attributed the success of the rescue to its timing at least as much as to the rescuers.
Burnes estimated that there were less than five minutes between the man’s cardiac arrest and the commencement of CPR — called the “golden time.” According to the National Institutes of Health, brain deterioration starts within three to five minutes of cardiac arrest, with survivability diminishing dramatically as the minutes pass.
According to the American Heart Association, effective bystander CPR provided immediately after sudden cardiac arrest can double or triple a victim’s chance of survival, but only 32 percent of cardiac arrest victims get CPR from a bystander.
Less than 8 percent of people who suffer cardiac arrest outside a hospital survive.
“Everything was lined up perfectly for this gentlemen,” Burnes said. “The people here and I and his friends acted quickly, and that all led to getting him back. It was the best possible outcome — good CPR administered as close as possible to the time (at which) he suffered his event.”
“It went incredibly well,” Cousins said. “They knew what to do, and they acted without hesitation. That, and my getting him there as quickly as we could, made all the difference.”
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