A Real-Life Lesson In Saving A Life

(By Dan Woog -- "Woog's World" -- Westport [CT] News, September 5, 2008)

To many teenagers, life can seem like running through a list. Learn Ohm’s Law: check. Learn to conjugate Latin verbs: check. Learn CPR: check.

Teenagers do those things because they must. But when, they wonder, will they ever need to understand electrical currents, speak Latin, or save a life?

Eric Meyer knows the answer to at least the last question. That answer is: When you least expect it.

The former Staples High School soccer player – now a sophomore at Drexel University – spends every summer in Mexico. His aunt and uncle live in La Paz, 150 miles north of Los  Cabos. This year, as often happens, Meyer and his relatives were invited by a good family friend to spend a week on his 85-foot yacht.

The first few days were great. Meyer spotted pilot whales and dolphins, and enjoyed the wonders of the Sea of Cortez. On Friday, July 25, the group scuba dove 110 feet deep to see black coral, a beautiful species now endangered by overtrading. Meyer thrilled to the vibrant colors, then enjoyed a late lunch of freshly caught octopus. He headed to his room, to watch a movie on his iPod.

At 7:30 that evening his aunt raced into his room, shrieking, “Do you know CPR?” He ran to the back deck, where the boat owner’s wife lay on her back. Her eyes were open but unstaring; foam ran past her blue lips.

Nearly a dozen people surrounded her, looking hopeless and lost. Someone tried to help, but only managed to smack the woman’s chest.

Meyer realized he knew a bit of CPR. Moving to the back of the deck – and nearly slipping into the water himself – he checked the woman’s airway, then searched for breaths and a pulse. There were none.

Meyer immediately started compressions, telling the woman’s husband when to perform breaths. After a minute she coughed, and vomited up water. Meyer rolled her on her side, then re-checked for breaths and a pulse.

This time, there were both. For the next hour the group administered oxygen, and made sure she was breathing.

They radioed for help, but could not locate a helicopter. Luckily, a boat in the area said it could take the victim to La Paz in a couple of hours. The trip would have taken 11 hours by yacht. Meyer remained by the woman’s side all the way back to land, ensuring her airway was clear and she was breathing properly. Yet she was unresponsive; once in a while, her eyes opened and rolled. Meyer was sure she would die. If not, he thought, she would live out her life severely brain damaged.

At the La Paz marina, an ambulance waited. In the emergency room, doctors discovered water in her lungs, as well as a broken rib (probably from the CPR). The group dispersed, expecting the worst.

The next morning, Meyer’s uncle woke him up. Miraculously, the woman had said, “Hello, Doctor. How are you doing today? What am I doing here?” She had no recollection of the entire trip.

“This is a miracle,” Meyer said. “It’s a miracle that strangers picked us up, a miracle for her result, even a miracle that I didn’t skip my lifeguard classes sophomore year. It’s amazing to see this woman who was dead, now engaging in a full-fledged conversation. The doctors said they’d never seen this before, and thought it was impossible.”

What happened to the woman was a shallow-water blackout, not uncommon among free divers who deprive themselves of oxygen for long periods of time. As she surfaced, she blacked out due to an abundance of carbon dioxide. That caused her to drown, floating 100 feet below the surface for up to six minutes without oxygen. Fortunately she was secured to a buoy, so when people realized she was not ascending, a deckhand reeled her in.

Looking back, Meyer said, he feared the responsibility of continuing on from the yacht to the rescue boat with the woman. “Not until her husband pointed to me and said ‘You’re coming with us’ did I realize I was in this 10,000 percent,” he recalled. “It clicked in my head that if it were me lying unconscious, holding on for dear life, that she would have done everything in her power for me.”

Meyer also worried that he might be performing CPR incorrectly. However, he also realized that some CPR is better than none, and no one else on the boat had any idea what they were doing.

The night of the accident, he vowed to take a CPR re-training class as soon as he returned to Westport – heading straight to the YMCA from the airport if necessary. “I was amazed that no one on the boat knew CPR, or what to do in a crisis like that – especially people who participate in dangerous activities like scuba diving and free diving,” Meyer said. “Now I feel compelled to make the knowledge known that CPR does save lives, period. It is imperative to know, because no one ever predicts what kind of situation you’ll be in. I never thought in a thousand years I’d be doing CPR on someone on that boat, let alone someone who is a world-class free diver.

“When I took that class sophomore year, I never grasped the importance,” Meyer continued. “It just didn’t relate to me. I guess I had that ‘invincible’ feeling most kids in Westport have. I see now that accidents do happen, even to those you least expect. I’ll always remember the helpless looks of everyone on the back deck. You should never feel helpless, because you can always take a simple course and learn how to act. The sacrifice of learning CPR is minute, compared to the effect it could have on someone’s life. Even if 20 people took the course and only one person ever used it, that would be one life saved.”