A Heart Stopping Ordeal
A Farmlands TFO found himself in the middle of a medical drama recently, when he helped resuscitate a farmer who had gone into cardiac arrest. He’s using the experience to spread the word about the benefits of having defibrillators on-farm.
Mike Collings, based at the Farmlands Taihape store, is also a long-serving member of the local volunteer fire brigade, which covers a vast distance in the lower North Island. His first aid training came in handy earlier this year, when he was attending a stock sale event at a customer’s sheep and beef station. The frightening incident occurred shortly after they had finished the sheep sale.
“We had about a 200-300m walk from where they were selling the sheep to where they were going to start selling the cattle. Apparently, this gentleman was already at the cattle yard. He was up on the railing and just having a bit of a look, and he just had a heart attack and fell off the railing, went down with no sign of life, no nothing. He was in cardiac arrest.” A couple of onlookers with first aid training, including another volunteer firefighter, started administering CPR on the man. Luckily, the station had a defibrillator on hand, thanks to a conversation Mike had with the station manager five years earlier. “I was out doing some work with him, and I said, you probably should look at buying one of these (defibrillators), not knowing that five years later I was going to be using it on someone.”
Mike says the station manager also had the foresight to bring the defibrillator down from his house to the woolshed. “He brought it down that morning, threw it in the ute, so it was only probably about 40-50m away from where we were. I was just walking up towards the cattle yard, which was probably about 20m away from where it happened. Then all of a sudden, I heard all this yelling: ‘Help! We need some help! Someone's having a cardiac arrest.’”