Nothing in Cross Scott’s life prepared him for finding a woman slumped over her steering wheel, her lips blue. He says he just reacted. He broke a back window, opened her door and crawled on top of her. With no training, he gave her CPR that may have saved her life.
Scott, the lead shop technician at Jack Furrier Tire & Auto Care on South Sixth Avenue and East Valencia Road, was test-driving a customer’s car on Jan. 11 when he saw the white sedan with its hazard lights blinking in a dirt pull-off by Sixth Avenue and Drexel Road. Scott never brings his phone when driving customers’ vehicles, to avoid the distraction of taking a call while driving.
When he pulled in front of the white sedan, he saw a woman sitting in the driver’s seat. As he approached her car, he noticed it was rolling. He quickly stuck a big rock under the front wheel.
When he saw the woman was unconscious, he began banging on her window and yelling for her to wake up. As car after car drove by, two women pulled over and called 911.
Scott broke the window with a rock. He reached in and unlocked the driver-side door. He checked the woman’s pulse and didn’t think she had one. One of the women who had stopped reclined the unconscious woman’s seat, and Scott crawled on top of her.
What popped into Scott’s head was an episode of the television show “The Office” in which character Michael Scott (actor Steve Carell) sings the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” while doing chest compressions on a dummy. The episode, where the gang takes an in-office CPR course, could actually be a tutorial in what not to do. The one thing it got right was using that song as a meter — the correct tempo for chest compressions.
As Scott straddled the woman and began chest compressions, he sang the song out loud. All he was thinking about was Michael Scott’s face, singing “Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.”
After a minute, the woman took a breath and threw up. The women helped him roll her onto her side.
Scott says when paramedics arrived, about 10 minutes had passed since he first pulled over. Scott says one of the paramedics with Tucson Fire told him if he hadn’t helped her, the situation could have turned out very differently.
Read the full story, by Danyelle Khmara, on tucson.com
Photo credit: Mike Christy | Arizona Daily Star
