June 1-7, 2024, is National CPR and AED Awareness Week. Sponsored by the American Heart Association, the annual event highlights how many lives could be saved by more Americans knowing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and how to use an automated external defibrillator (AED).
Maria van Pelt, PhD, CRNA, CNE, FAAN, FAANA, a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA) and Clinical Professor, knows firsthand the importance of these life-saving skills and wants to encourage lay people to get CPR-certified. In the past nine years, she’s saved two people’s lives with CPR outside of the clinical setting — and one of those lives was her husband’s.
“I feel so honored and privileged that two times in a lifetime, I’ve gotten to save somebody’s life with CPR,” said van Pelt, an AANA member since 1998.
In 2015, she was in the car with her husband when he became lightheaded while driving. They pulled over and switched drivers, and they thought that perhaps he was dehydrated because he had cycled 50 miles the day before. Shortly thereafter, he became unconscious, van Pelt said.
Her husband had experienced an arrhythmia-induced cardiac arrest. She performed CPR on him for 16 minutes until an ambulance arrived. A year later, she wrote a Facebook post about the incident and thanked the strangers who stopped to help, including a woman who helped with CPR and a man who lifted her husband out of the car.
“This event has given me a deeper appreciation for life and our finite time on this earth,” she wrote.
That experience also gave her the confidence to jump into action the next time she witnessed a person in cardiac arrest.
Last year, she was driving her son to the train station in their town when they came across an accident. A pickup truck had gone into a utility pole. Van Pelt got out of her car and immediately recognized that the man in the driver’s seat was in cardiac arrest. She needed to get him out of the truck, but with the doors locked, she had only one option.
“I said to my son, ‘We need to break a window.’ I got in the back of the pickup truck, and people were yelling at me because the truck was still in drive, saying I needed to get out of there,” she said.
She noticed a utility truck down the street and instructed her son to see if the person in that vehicle had something she could use to break a window. He did, and after he broke the window, he and her son unbuckled the man in cardiac arrest and lowered him to the ground.
“He was pulseless, so I started CPR. You can fatigue doing CPR, and to do it effectively, you should switch with someone else every two minutes. I asked the crowd if anybody else knew CPR,” she said.
No one did.
Van Pelt continued to perform CPR until an ambulance arrived a few minutes later to transport the man to the hospital. Through a local Facebook group, she connected with the man’s niece and learned he’d had open heart surgery. Recently, van Pelt reunited with him for the first time since the incident. “I was so thankful to have the opportunity to meet him and see him alive and well.”
She said in both events, it took her a while to process them afterward. She described dealing with post-traumatic stress, particularly in her husband’s case. Ultimately, she said she felt inspired to do good and help save more lives.
“I feel so passionate about encouraging others to learn CPR because in the second scenario, I was the only one in the crowd who knew CPR,” van Pelt said. “I stayed in touch with the man who helped me break the window, and he said I inspired him to get CPR-certified. If one person learns how to do CPR after reading this, then I feel like my mission is accomplished.”
To find a CPR course near you, visit the American Heart Association’s website.