Fireman back from the dead
‘My heart stopped’: fire boss saved by his colleagues who performed CPR.
Atop firefighter who had a cardiac arrest lay dead on the floor of a sports complex for four minutes before his colleagues who were working the night shift revived him with CPR.
On October 5, 2014, Kerry Gregory, who was then the Fire Service’s Auckland regional manager, had just finished playing a game of indoor soccer with his 19-year-old son in New Lynn when he started feeling funny and told his son he was going to sit the next match out.
“He turned around and my heart had stopped and I was dead,” Gregory said.
The Fire Service had only started responding to medical emergencies a few months earlier and a crew arrived in about four minutes.
Colin Wright led the Avondale team that was sent to the scene, not knowing the victim was his boss and a colleague for two decades.
“He was in a very bad way,” Wright told the Herald on Sunday.
A defibrillator had already been used to try to restart his heart when a firefighter started CPR.
“[The paramedics had] put an airway into him. After a couple of minutes of one of my boys giving CPR he had gagged the airway out so he’d regained consciousness from CPR alone,” Wright said.
Wright has never forgotten watching one of his crew members bring Gregory back from brink of death. He was conscious but still in a critical condition and was rushed to Auckland Hospital, where he had heart surgery.
It was about a week later that Gregory remembered it was his team who saved him.
“It was absolutely amazing. Only 15 per cent of people who have cardiac arrests make it through so I’m very lucky in that respect in itself. But it does make you think what was the reason I was saved?”
Since his heart attack Gregory has travelled to fire stations around the country for his job and said he often tells crews his story.
“I think it’s really important for people to see the impact that we can make on others’ lives,” he said. “I’m a walking example of the good work that our people have done and if it wasn’t for [the Fire Service] doing medical response I wouldn’t be here.”
Gregory said firefighters’ roles had changed dramatically in his 27 years in the service and crews were now often called on to help at medical emergencies and extreme weather events.
Fire crews were working together more closely with other emergency services than before, Gregory said.
Yesterday urban New Zealand Fire Service crews were amalgamated with the rural fire service to form a new combined organisation — Fire and Emergency New Zealand.
Gregory said the change would make roles and responsibilities and chains of command and control clearer.