“I was on my way to an experiment in Milbank, and then I heard a guy yelling,” Cassandra Stroud, BC ’12, said. “I went over and there was a guy lying on the floor.”
It was Saturday, Oct. 18, and Stroud was about to save a life.
A group of workers were installing carpet on the first floor of Milbank Hall when one of them collapsed with what would later be diagnosed as a heart attack. Stroud, passing by on her way to psychology, found his coworkers looking on helplessly.
“I guess I just assumed everyone else knew CPR,” she said. “I told them that they needed to start CPR, and they were like, ‘We don’t know how to do that.’”
Stroud, who learned CPR in a sixth-grade babysitting course and had not practiced it since, taught a bystander to perform chest compressions before beginning to breath into the victim’s mouth.
“He didn’t know what he was doing,” she said of the man who she taught chest compressions to, “but I showed him how because I knew I couldn’t do it hard enough for long enough.”
Barnard Public Safety officers soon responded to what they expected to be a routine first aid call.
“What I figured was one of the guys had cut himself with a [carpet-cutting] knife,” Officer Dennis Pogan said.
Instead, they found a rescue already taking place. Although Stroud does not remember being offered aid, several officers say she remained in place even when offered relief.
“I said, ‘Do you want a break?’” Pogan said, “and she said, ‘No, I got it.’”
She and her assistant continued CPR for roughly 15 minutes.
“In spite of all the chaos—the radio calls, the additional security people responding, the phone calls to the office—she never missed a beat,” Public Safety Supervisor Jim Kelly said.
Kelly called for Public Safety’s defibrillator, which he applied twice without success. Paramedics administered a third defibrillation, as well as medication, finally restoring the victim’s pulse.
“When she heard they were able to restore the pulse, she just broke down,” Kelly said. “The emotion overwhelmed her at that point.”
Stroud stressed that the experience was far more disturbing than exciting.
“Everyone is like, ‘Oh, CPR, you’re saving someone’s life,’” she said, “but it felt like I was working on someone who was already dead.”
The victim was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital and is still listed in serious condition.
Stroud has since met with members of the Department of Public Safety, many of whom have expressed admiration for her both publicly and in person.
“We are planning to formally commend her [Stroud] and Mr. Kelly and the other officers who responded,” Director of Public Safety Dianna Pennetti said. “We’ve been in conversation with members of the administration to see what awards are available to her.”
The incident also marked what Pennetti called Kelly’s “second save of the year”—according to her, he performed the Heimlich maneuver on a choking Barnard student in June. It also comes only a few months after Barnard broadened its CPR training to include, among others, all Public Safety officers and supervisors. The department plans, Pennetti said, to install more Automatic External Defibrillator machines on campus.
Kelly and his co-workers insist that Stroud’s actions kept the victim alive until the professionals responded.
“If it had been another 10 minutes and we had come upon him then, it would have been a very different story,” Kelly said. “She’s the hero here.”
mary.kohlmann@columbiaspectator.com
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