Vaughan Collier asked his 16-year-old daughter to turn around on SH1 so he could help at a breakdown on the side of the road. The rest unfolded:
“Dad was lying on his left side under the van and his breathing went really raspy and he started gurgling,” [Nicole Collier] recalls. “I looked at his feet and hands and they were both yellow, which is what always happens to him, so I knew it was heart-related. He started going stiff so I grabbed my phone and pulled him out with my left arm and just ripped him out from under the van.
“His face had started going yellow, his tongue was swelling and saliva started coming out of his mouth and I was thinking, ‘Don’t you dare die on me Dad’.
But he already had. Collier had just had his seventh heart attack. […]
While [Freya Johnstone], an air hostess, had undertaken a first aid course for her job, she had never carried out CPR before. However, the pair took turns.
“I was thinking this guy is not going to come back to life and I don’t want his daughter to watch him die and me not doing anything.” […]
[I]n the traffic happened to be a convoy of medics returning to Auckland from a course they had undertaken in Kawakawa, who heard over the communications system about the roadside event.
The first one pulled over and took over compressions before the second carload followed suit and applied their defibrillator, but with no response. The ambulance then arrived and took over, this time with success and Collier, who is believed to have been dead for 10 minutes, began to regain colour. […]
Says Nicole: “I said to the paramedics, ‘Don’t worry, he’s like a weed, you can’t kill him. I think he’s like a cat with nine lives.”
“Yeah, I am the year of the tiger,” admits Collier. “There’s some luck, it was just a fluke that everyone was there.”
“Nicole is the most amazing person I know and I owe a great deal to her and however many people stopped to assist,” says Collier who, unlike during his last heart attack, cannot recall an out-of-body experience. “I was told that, because of the rhythm of tachycardia, I would not have been revived without electricity in the form of the defib machine and Nicole only had 90 seconds to make the difference while compressions kept my blood/oxygen circulating. It was an incredible achievement and would have been a proud moment for any parent to witness. Except I was dead at the time.”
NewstalkZB
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