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When you hear a firefighter has saved a life, what do you picture? Do you imagine one in full gear running through a burning building to get to someone, or do you picture using the Jaws of Life to free a victim trapped in a vehicle?
In the case of three firefighters from the 886th Civil Engineer Squadron, they saved a life by utilizing their emergency medical technician training.
“We responded to a report of a female with a possible stroke,” said Staff Sgt. Robert Davis, 886th Civil Engineer Squadron firefighter. “Once we arrived on scene, we found her on the ground unresponsive and not breathing.”
The crew assessed the situation and reacted by performing CPR.
“The signs and symptoms she was showing were indicative of administrating CPR with an automated external defibrillator, providing compressions as well as rescue breaths,” he said. “After four and a half minutes, she was breathing on her own but we continued rescue breaths until the off-base ambulance arrived.”
German medics arrived on scene and transported the patient to a hospital in Kaiserslautern, where she was treated.
The team was made up of three NCOs: Davis and Staff Sgts. Theodore Warshaw and Solomon Rigsby.
“Normally, a crew is made up of four or five people. There’s one NCO, one senior Airman and two Airmen first class,” Warshaw said. “It just so happened that we were all in one truck together.”
Firefighters train multiple hours a day for many different things, ranging from rescuing people trapped in cars, to fighting fires to acting as EMTs, he said.
“We have so many different responsibilities that our training time varies,” Warshaw said. “I can guarantee that for at least three hours a day we’re doing some type of training, whether it’s in the classroom, or outside doing an exercise simulating buildings on fire, an aircraft crash or pulling someone from a manhole.”
For a call like this, adrenaline kicked in and affected how these firefighters reacted.
“My mind went blank and time slowed down,” Warshaw said. “Four minutes normally isn’t that long, but in a situation like this, where we are doing CPR for that long, it seems like an eternity.”
The firefighters relied on past training to ensure a positive outcome for the situation.
“We train so much on a day to day basis that in a situation like this our training definitely kicks in and takes over,” Warshaw said. “It’s nice to see that the training we do pays off when we get a call like this with an outcome like this. I was surprised by how much my training took over, it was like muscle memory.”
The woman was released from hospital care days later and has been in stable condition since.
