EDMONTON, AL--Moments after he stepped off a flight from Phoenix Wednesday evening, Wayne Gaalaas felt a bit light-headed. Then he collapsed.
Within seconds, WestJet and United aircrews at the Edmonton International Airport stepped in, performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the 73-year-old Camrose man before using a nearby defibrillator to restart his heart.
“It shocked him and shortly after, he started feeling better,” said Julie Gaalaas, Wayne’s daughter-in-law. “He came to and was able to talk. And the ambulance came and took him to hospital.”
Marlene Gaalaas followed her husband to hospital with their son Jeff. At first Jeff didn’t know what was happening when fire crews and paramedics rushed past the gates.
Thirty-five years ago, Gaalaas was one of the first people in Alberta to undergo a kidney transplant.
He has had heart problems before, Julie said, but felt well recently. And while he’s being run through a battery of tests at the Mazankowski Heart Institute, his daughter-in-law has been trying to find a way to thank the crew members who stepped in and helped.
“We’re saying thank you to everybody,” she said. “It’ll be a good Christmas this year, that’s for sure.”
Since 2009, Edmonton International Airport has installed more than 60 automated external defibrillators with the goal of having one no more than a minute away, said Heather Hamilton, spokeswoman for the Edmonton International Airport. Chances of survival increase by roughly 75 per cent when an AED is used within three minutes, along with cardiopulmonary resuscitation and dialing 911, the Heart and Stroke Foundation estimates.
The airport’s AED devices are essentially foolproof. They give audible instructions. The machine checks for a heartbeat, so it’s impossible to shock someone who doesn’t need it.
Defibrillators have saved at least three other lives at the Edmonton International Airport. Last year, an RCMP officer and an off-duty firefighter revived a man behind the U.S. customs area using a nearby AED, shocking the man’s heart four or five times.
Hamilton says she’s glad Gaalaas’s family won’t have to “cope with a really, really different Christmas.” But she also wonders if the message about the power of AEDs is getting out. It was crew members, she notes, not passengers, who stepped in.
Incidents like this one could embolden others to act when necessary. While the machine automatically sets off an alarm, passengers shouldn’t be afraid to grab and use it. A life might be at stake.
“You’re not going to get in trouble at all,” Hamilton said. “You want the alarm to go off, the alarm is what’s bringing help to you.”
A respiratory therapist by training, Julie Gaalaas said the incident shows why she goes through CPR and AED training every year.
“This kind of brings home the reason why you have to do that,” Gaalaas said. “It really did save his life.”
SOURCE: Brent Wittmeir, The Edmonton Journal