Stephen Hamilton doesn’t remember the day, but he remembers the men who saved his life.
On Friday evening, Hamilton wiped tears from his eyes in the equipment bay of one of Juneau’s fire stations as Tommy Vrabec, Peter Fergin, and several Capital City Fire-Rescue members accepted lifesaving awards.
On Jan. 7, Hamilton collapsed while playing tennis at the Juneau Racquet Club. His partners initially thought it was a seizure and called 911. It wasn’t a seizure. Hamilton’s pulse stopped.
“I had heart failure. It just stopped; it wasn’t a heart attack,” he said.
Fergin and George Crowder (who was not at Friday’s ceremony) started CPR on Hamilton while another man ran to the club’s office.
Vrabec was working there, and he remembers someone running in and asking for the club’s automatic defibrillator, a device the size of a record player.
Vrabec, who had trained as an EMT while a student at Juneau-Douglas High School, grabbed the defibrillator and followed its recorded instructions to shock Hamilton’s heart into rhythm. He’d used a defibrillator on a mannequin before, but never on a human being.
“The big thing that makes a difference, the studies show, is CPR … and electricity,” said Joe Michler, an emergency medical training officer with CCFR. “By doing what these guys did, it makes it easier for us to do what we do.”
“It used to be we didn’t get anybody back … and now it’s almost expected, if it’s a shockable rhythm,” Michler said.
Last year, according to statistics quoted by Michler, 60 percent of CCFR patients receiving CPR ended up surviving.
In Hamilton’s case, firefighters arrived on scene to take over CPR duties, and by the time he was taken to Bartlett Memorial Hospital, he had a weak pulse.
He fully recovered and now has a permanent pacemaker and a defibrillator implanted in his chest.
CCFR Chief Richard Etheridge said Friday’s ceremony and others like it are intended to recognize people who did the right thing.
“You took the training to know what to do, and you stepped in and did it. A lot of times, people will kind of step back and say, ‘I don’t want to be involved,’ but you guys jumped right in,” Etheridge said.
Hamilton said he knows what would have happened if Vrabec, Fergin and others hadn’t done the right thing.
“A number of years ago, my mother passed away, and she died—” he snapped his fingers, “just like that. A few years before that, her father, same thing. He dropped dead in the checkout stand of an IGA store. They always told us it was a massive heart attack, which it wasn’t. It was heart failure, and I was in the right place at the right time. Thank you.”
