911 dispatcher praises girl who tried to save dad’s life
‘She was truly a hero in my eyes’
An Allegheny County 911 trainee answered the call from Swissvale at about 11:45 p.m. A 10year-old girl was on the line. Her father had collapsed at home and was unresponsive.
Paul Yuretich, a lead 911 operator, saw that the trainee was overwhelmed that the caller was a child.
“I was right beside her so I plugged into her console and took the call,” Mr. Yuretich said during a recent interview.
It was in early January, but the call stayed with him for several reasons. It is not common that the caller is a child, and this one “followed my instructions calmly,” he said. He was on the phone with her about 20 minutes, guiding her through CPR.
The call also stuck with him because he wasn’t able to attend the funeral of the girl’s father.
Eric Mikulas died that night at age 41. His mother, Nancy Mikulas, said the autopsy showed his arteries were 80 percent clogged.
“There is a family history,” she
said. He had had multiple heart bypass surgeries the year before, she said, but he was otherwise healthy, active and trim.
For Mr. Yuretich, attending funerals for people whose loved ones he has dealt with on 911 is a way to get closure because 911 operators rarely find out otherwise what happened to a person. He also wants to reassure the loved ones.
“It helps the family and it helps me,” he said. “I couldn’t let that 10-year-old child wonder, ‘Did I do it right?’”
But the Mikulas funeral was scheduled with too little time for him to change a shift, so he wrote a letter instead.
Nancy Mikulas shared the letter. It stated, in part, “I have found in my experience… [that] family members, particularly those who are the initial callers and are given resuscitation instructions that do not produce a save, feel they have failed. … I pray she does not feel this way. I can assure you and her that she did everything she could have done prior to the arrival of the police and paramedics. … She was truly a hero in my eyes and I hope she made you and your family very proud.”
It was the first letter he has written in his 20-year career, he said, and it prompted Nancy Mikulas to write a letter to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Random Acts of Kindness column, praising him for his efforts and for his letter.
“We are lucky to have such a caring and compassionate man working for all of us in the Pittsburgh area,” she wrote.
Ms. Mikulas said her granddaughter, who is now living with her mother, from whom her father was separated, would someday like to meet Mr. Yuretich. For now, she continues to struggle from the trauma of the emergency. She asked that the girl’s name not be used in this story, in part because she has been made to feel guilty by some classmates.
She said Mr. Yuretich called to ask how the girl was doing. “He is just so caring. I called his boss after I got his letter and said, ‘I want him to get an attaboy.’”
Call center operators do their work anonymously without a public face. They have to stay calm in frantic situations and adapt to the frustration of being a short leg in a race without a view of the finish line.
“Most people don’t think about 911 until they’re dialing the numbers,” Mr. Yuretich said.
Most calls are a minute or two, tops. The emergency evaporates when the next call comes in, but the impact of some can settle in.
“A lot of calls you do mechanically, but the ones that [take their toll] are the people who are struggling,” he said. “You can hear it on the other end. An 80-year-old woman trying to revive her 85-year-old husband, and I say, ‘Move him off the couch, and she says, ‘I can’t.’ You hear her crying. Many times, people say, ‘I don’t think I’m doing it right,’ and I say, ‘You’re doing fine, keep doing it.’
“When I was younger, I didn’t let it bother me, but as you get older, they build up.”
Mr. Yuretich lives in Reserve and has four children, the oldest 29, the youngest 16, he said, and as they were growing up, he would consider the ages of people on whom there was a warrant or who were fleeing a house fire or who were like the girl in Swissvale, “and I’d think, ‘just four years younger or two years older’” than one of his own.
“I still have ‘em,” he said, pointing to his head. “I wonder about them: Are they still around? How are they? And you can’t find out.”
Unless there is an obituary.
Ms. Mikulas said that after her granddaughter called her, “it took us 40 minutes to get to Swissvale” from Lower Burrell. “She came running to us, crying, ‘I think my dad is dead.’
“Then I got this most beautiful letter dated Jan. 9.”
Mr. Yuretich praised the girl for “maturity beyond that of a child her age,” and wrote, “I am proud of her.”
He said the first funeral he attended was for a baby whose mother had found the child unresponsive in the crib.
“I couldn’t let her think she hadn’t done her best” to save the child. “We sat and we talked and I told her, ‘There was nothing else we could have done.’”
He wanted Nancy Mikulas’ granddaughter to know there was a “we” in that awful moment of her life, too: “I was there with her,” he wrote, “if only over the phone.”