Stephen Hamilton doesn\u2019t remember the day, but he remembers the men who saved his life.<\/p>\n
On Friday evening, Hamilton wiped tears from his eyes in the equipment bay of one of Juneau\u2019s fire stations as Tommy Vrabec, Peter Fergin, and several Capital City Fire-Rescue members accepted lifesaving awards.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t a seizure. Hamilton\u2019s pulse stopped.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had heart failure. It just stopped; it wasn\u2019t a heart attack,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Fergin and George Crowder (who was not at Friday\u2019s ceremony) started CPR on Hamilton while another man ran to the club\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
Vrabec was working there, and he remembers someone running in and asking for the club\u2019s automatic defibrillator, a device the size of a record player.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s heart into rhythm. He\u2019d used a defibrillator on a mannequin before, but never on a human being.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe big thing that makes a difference, the studies show, is CPR \u2026 and electricity,\u201d said Joe Michler, an emergency medical training officer with CCFR. \u201cBy doing what these guys did, it makes it easier for us to do what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt used to be we didn\u2019t get anybody back \u2026 and now it\u2019s almost expected, if it\u2019s a shockable rhythm,\u201d Michler said. <\/p>\n
Last year, according to statistics quoted by Michler, 60 percent of CCFR patients receiving CPR ended up surviving. <\/p>\n
In Hamilton\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
He fully recovered and now has a permanent pacemaker and a defibrillator implanted in his chest.<\/p>\n
CCFR Chief Richard Etheridge said Friday\u2019s ceremony and others like it are intended to recognize people who did the right thing.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou 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, \u2018I don\u2019t want to be involved,\u2019 but you guys jumped right in,\u201d Etheridge said.<\/p>\n
Hamilton said he knows what would have happened if Vrabec, Fergin and others hadn\u2019t done the right thing.<\/p>\n
\u201cA number of years ago, my mother passed away, and she died\u2014\u201d he snapped his fingers, \u201cjust 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\u2019t. It was heart failure, and I was in the right place at the right time. Thank you.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Stephen Hamilton doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s fire stations as Tommy Vrabec, Peter Fergin, and several Capital City Fire-Rescue members accepted lifesaving awards. On Jan. 7, Hamilton collapsed while playing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":426,"featured_media":8023,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-8022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/426"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8022"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=8022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}