How to Save a Life

It’s been a tumultuous past few weeks, and I have struggled with knowing how to cope with this story. It’s hard to know how much to tell and how much no one needs the burden of hearing. I’ll do my best to find a balance here.

On Friday, September  16th, I was sitting quietly in my office writing an email to a colleague about a research project we would like to conduct this semester. Two of my coworkers, who share my office with me, were in outside meetings for the afternoon. My superviser, Maja, was sitting at her desk also quietly writing emails. The day was almost over, and we were looking forward to having a relaxing weekend after traveling for work in the earlier half of the week.

But then two students appeared in our doorway. They were out of breath and they stood, trembling and silent, for a few seconds before speaking.

“Do you know the emergency number? Our professor’s not breathing!” They had been in a classroom down the hall from my office watching a movie. Their professor had been sitting in the back of the class. The lights were off. The windows were closed and the room was stuffy. At one point, a student turned around and saw that the man’s face was bright blue, his shirt drenched in sweat.

I called 112 (the Danish version of 911, although 911 also works here). I tried to get the students out of the classroom, but they stood, shell-shocked, staring at the dying man. The woman on the phone with me couldn’t understand my terribly American pronunciation for the street we were on. She told me we needed to start CPR immediately, but that we needed to stay on the line with her.

“Does anyone know CPR?” I screamed. About five students raised their hands. “We need to start CPR!”

Everyone stood still. Staring.

I grabbed the shoulders of a boy standing next to me. “Do you know what building we’re in?” I asked him. He nodded, his eyes wide. I handed him my cell phone. “Stay on the line with this woman and tell her what building we’re in.”

I ran over to the man, who was still propped up in a sitting position. “Help me lay him down!” A few students grabbed his shoulders and a few helped me grab his legs. I unbuttoned his shirt, undid his belt, even unbuttoned his jeans and took off his shoes without thinking. Subconsciously, I was worried there would be metal touching his body. But in the moment, I wasn’t sure why I was doing anything that I was doing.

One student, a girl, was crouching on the floor next to me. “Do you want to breathe first, or do compressions first?” I asked her.

“Uh…uh…breathe, I guess–”

“Wait!” another student said from across the room. “Look at his chest!” He chest was all puffed up with his last breath stuck inside, and his skin was covered in lumps and scars.

“What?” I wasn’t sure what this meant. Did he have a pacemaker? Would it cause more damage to conduct CPR? “Do we still start?” I couldn’t think. And then the student next to me began doing compressions, counting in perfect rhythm up to 30. I rubbed her back, telling her she was doing a good job. I didn’t want to think about how my mouth was about to go on this man’s clammy blue mouth soon. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to ever see this, never, ever, ever in my entire life.

But I did it. I pinched his nose, put one hand under his jaw, put my lips around his and breathed twice, deeply. The student began a second round of compressions. A colleague ran in with a defibrillator and began attaching the pieces to the professor. I had the student trade off with me after I breathed again, hoping she wouldn’t get tired of doing compressions. The professor was shocked twice and we did about six rounds of heart massage before the paramedics arrived. As soon as they walked in the room, I about collapsed on the floor, shaking, trying not to cry in front of all these strangers and the scared, scared students.

Maja stood in the doorway, just as shocked as the students. She had gotten the defibrillator and the colleague who knew how to use it, plus she had directed the paramedics where to go. She and I hugged in the doorway. I was too scared to let go of her.

Outside in the courtyard, the students from the class stood in a quiet circle, trembling. I hugged a few of them, but tried to maintain my composure. I wanted to be a role model for them. If they saw me break down, they might also break down. If they saw me stand strong, telling them all that it was going to be okay, they might be more likely to believe me. But the more I stood idle, the more the scene haunted me. I just performed CPR. I just performed CPR. Fuck.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. I turned around and started walking down the street, past the ambulances, not sure where I was going. As soon as I was a few doors down, I began crying uncontrollably. Strangers walking past me on the sidewalk looked away. I made it one block before I realized I needed to stay with the students who had witnessed this. We just went through a similar, extremely bizarre experience. It would be okay if they saw me break down, because crying uncontrollably about a traumatic experience is a healthy way to cope with that trauma. And I wanted them to know that it was also okay if they needed to break down. I didn’t even know their names, and they didn’t know mine. I needed to be back there. I needed to be with them.

When I got back to the courtyard, the students were all gone. Maja told me someone had asked them to disperse. There was nothing more that could be done with them, even though their professor was still upstairs with the paramedics. I began to pace back and forth, hugging every person who came into the courtyard. At first, no one knew I had been the one to perform CPR. They only knew that it had happened in my building.

Eventually, the stretcher came down and the ambulances took off.

“He’s breathing on his own,” Maja told me, grabbing my hands and holding me close to her. Her eyes were watery as she tried to smile.

It wasn’t until after that she told me she knew the professor. That he had been sick for a long time. Cancer, for the past three years. He wasn’t expected to live long in the first place. And it wasn’t until about a week later that I found out the professor had also been a famous Danish politician.

In the days after the event, I received small tidbits of information. It had been a heart attack. He was going through surgery. He was recovering well. His wife was very appreciative. A new professor had been found to cover the class. Some of my coworkers kept calling me a hero, telling me I was so amazing and strong and wonderful for saving a man’s life. But I didn’t feel like any of those things. I just felt nauseous. I kept thinking about his blue, blue face. I knew he would be braindead, even if he recovered from the heart attack/surgery. I kept remembering the feeling of his sweaty goatee against my chin. The lumps on his chest. The shaking of my hands and the looks on his students’ faces. It didn’t feel real, especially when conversations at lunch quickly changed to talking about weekend plans and funny jokes and everyone laughing, moving on with their lives, not at all plagued by the terribleness of watching a man die.

The first week afterwards, I was mostly okay as long as I was around people, but even then, I was extremely high-strung. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t focus on my work. I couldn’t figure out what items on my To Do list were most important. I couldn’t pay attention to an entire conversation. I had an upset stomach and I could barely eat a slice of bread for lunch. And as soon as I was no longer around people, I didn’t feel like a human anymore. I laid in my bed for hours staring at the ceiling, my body tense with anxiety, crying on and off without any direct awareness of what I was thinking or feeling. It was terrible and I felt pathetic. I saved a man’s life! I did everything I could! I acted when no one else did!

But then new thoughts filled my anxious brain. If no one but me reacted to a man who needed CPR, then who was going to react if I was the one who needed emergency care? Would everyone just stand around gawking, instead of helping me? And if this man could have a heart attack while watching a movie in class, then who else around me was going to have a heart attack? The man at the crosswalk on my way to work? The driver of the 5A bus I was riding? A stranger on the computer-operated metro? And if someone else around me had a heart attack, would I have to be the person to perform CPR, since I had already done it before? I didn’t want to do it again. Never, ever again.

That Friday, one week after the heart attack, it was announced that the professor had no brain functioning. He would be taken off of life support and his family was going to sit around and wait for him to take his last breath. Many people reached out to me, telling me how sorry they were and that it wasn’t my fault that he wouldn’t make it. But I actually felt better knowing he was going to die, mostly because when I walked into his classroom and saw his blue face, I knew he wouldn’t survive. It felt like a false advertisement all along for everyone to congratulate me and rejoice that he was going to start teaching again in a few weeks. Meanwhile, I was secretly holding onto the image of a dead man’s blue face, waiting to hear the truth.

The second week afterwards, I felt a little better. Not as high-strung. I was just very, very tired. It didn’t matter how long I slept or what I did during the day. I was exhausted. I still couldn’t eat much, couldn’t focus, and couldn’t hold a normal conversation. I felt less like I was thinking about the incident all the time. But I still didn’t feel normal.

That week, on September 27th, the professor peacefully passed away surrounded by his family. His funeral was the following week, and although I was invited, I felt like an intruder attending. I hadn’t known that his man existed before I performed CPR on him. Plus, it was all going to be in Danish.

Now, one month later, I feel a bit more like a human again. I get random flashbacks of that day, but they don’t feel like real memories. They feel like the “what if” scenarios that sometimes play out in my head–a weirdly calming game, like the “what if we got snowed into the school and had to sleep overnight on the mats in the gym and eat cafeteria food for dinner?” scenario I secretly mapped out in childhood.

I try to talk about it when I’m thinking about it. But after 4 weeks, it feels like everyone is tired of hearing about it. There is nothing new to tell. Last week while I was in Warsaw with a group of students for work, I accidentally mentioned it at dinner one night. I had planned to keep this part of my life from the students–they didn’t need to know that I had been part of a traumatic experience, just as they don’t need to know my age or whether or not I have a boyfriend. Yet it slipped out.

“I performed CPR with your friend,” I said.

“Oh.”

The conversation was silent for maybe half a second before a different student said, “So what do you do at DIS when you’re not on trips like this with students?”

And just like that, we had moved away from the trauma. They didn’t want to know more. Or maybe they did, but they didn’t know how to ask for it. How to handle it. What to do with it. I wanted to cry the entire rest of the night. I know they’re just students and technically weren’t supposed to know about this in the first place. But it was a conversation that was so representative of the past month. How am I supposed to continue living my normal life when no one knows that I carry this burden with me? Contrarily, how can I continue living a normal life without defining myself as the girl who had this happen to her?

I don’t have the answers yet, and I’m still working on being okay. I’m in a much better place now, 4 weeks later, which makes me optimistic to know how I’ll be doing in 4 more weeks. Time will tell. In the meantime, I will continue to keep myself busy. Hanging out with my coworkers and their kids. Saying “yes” to parties, even though I don’t drink and I like to go to bed early and I get overwhelmed in crowds. Making dinner with other interns. Finding something new to cook. Joining a floorball team.

Writing. Writing. Writing.

Thanks for reading.