Heart attack drama: Auckland’s Westpac rescue helicopter nurse and crew save lives

It was not difficult for Jane Caldwell to think the worst, staring at her partner Graham Jones as he lay face down on a remote path.

“I’ve seen a lot of dead people. They looked like a dead person,” Caldwell said.

At first, he thought he was “looking at spiders”, but then realized that he had collapsed.

“My head was, ‘He’s dead. How am I going to tell his kids, who are 17 and 20, that he’s dead?”

It was late November and the Swanson couple were on the Te Henga Walkway, a track overlooking the Tasman Sea in West Auckland, improving their fitness before a planned South Island Heaphy Track bum.

Mobile phone reception is spotty and there is no way an ambulance can get anywhere near the cliff walkway.

But help, or as Jones would describe it, an angel, was just around the corner.

As Caldwell checked on Jones and a passerby called 111, Middlemore Hospital ER Nurse Tori Prendergast stepped into the unfolding drama.

“And she said, ‘Is everything okay? I’m a nurse.’

Caldwell is also a nurse, but she was too close to him.

“At work, I’m Captain Calm – mentally ill, weapons, whatever. But I thought it was all over. He’s having a heart attack, how do you resurrect someone here?”

Nor was there anyone more qualified to step into Jones’s medical crisis.

In addition to being an emergency nurse, Prendergast has taught acute assessment nursing students and is in the middle of his training to be a physician.

She was lucky to be there too – still recovering from a shoulder dislocation she sustained while performing CPR, the 30-year-old had almost come back sooner.

By now, Jones was conscious.

His pulse was good and he was even able to make those around him laugh when Prendergast, testing whether the 67-year-old was confused and potentially suffering from a cardiac or neurological medical event, asked Jones what international crisis he was going through.

“I loved his answer. In my head, I was thinking [the crisis] It was Covid and he said, ‘Trump,’ which made everyone laugh. “

Jones, who only felt dizzy before collapsing, did not appear to be at immediate risk, and after consulting with another healthcare professional over the phone, it was decided that he should try walking to an ambulance.

But the brief attempt failed and Jones’s pulse became worrying.

Still, he continued to answer “no” to questions that could indicate he was having a heart attack, Prendergast said.

The turning point came when she asked him if he could feel a heaviness in his chest.

He started to say no.

“Then he said, ‘Heavy is a good word, isn’t it?'”

It was time to call for a rescue helicopter.

Prendergast had already given his two friends a stern warning, out of earshot of Jones and Caldwell.

“I said, ‘Take off your backpacks and prepare to do CPR if I ask.’ And that’s a really shady place to be, alone, on the side of a cliff.

“I would need a defibrillator, a shock, and we don’t have that. But once these [helicopter] Boys come in and they have drugs and defibrillators, he has a better chance. And what he really needed was to be at Auckland City Hospital with his stent, and that’s what these guys can provide.

“I was quite relieved to hear those rotors.”

Eighteen minutes after taking off from its base at Ardmore Airport at 4.11pm, the Auckland Westpac Rescue Helicopter was hovering overhead, with intensive care paramedic Ross Aitken descending with a winch.

After a quick evaluation and insertion of an IV, the helicopter crew’s task was simple, Aitken said.

“What we had to do was extract him and take him to the hospital.”

Road tests confirmed that Jones was having a heart attack and his condition changed to critical.

At 5 p.m., 16 minutes after he was put aboard the Westpac 2, he was in the hospital.

Jones says that sometimes his closeness to death feels like it happened to someone else.

A stent and medications took care of his blocked left coronary artery, he was released from the hospital in a few days, he’s on blood thinners now, and he’s already re-planning that bum Heaphy Track.

He is grateful to the hospital staff, the rescue helicopter crew, the people on the scene, including a Niuean man they were unable to reach to thank after the rescue, and especially Caldwell and Prendergast.

“I am enormously grateful, the kindness of others really, and services like this [rescue helicopter].

“And to the nurses, who are absolute angels.”

– Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust is hosting a lottery for a 2021 Shelby GT-H car worth $ 160,000 to raise $ 600,000, enough to save at least 100 lives. Tickets are available at www.rescuehelicopter.org.nz