WEST POINT, Ind. (AP) - A person can learn a lot about someone in 17 minutes, if they take the time to listen.
Brandie Kopsas-Kingsley, a registered nurse, used those few minutes to get to know West Lafayette firefighter Jim Redd - a COVID-19 patient who showed up at IU Health University Hospital in Indianapolis. She got to know him better than she knows most of the patients who arrive in the intensive care unit where she works.
“It’s really a race to save a life once you get somebody who requires that much oxygen,” Kopsas-Kingsley said as she described the chaos surrounding Redd’s arrival.
“He looked a little bit distressed. His color was off. He had that look in his eyes like ‘I don’t understand,’” she said.
Her goal was to keep Redd calm, so she chatted with him as lie on a hospital bed while doctors, nurses and others hustled around getting tubes, IVs and machines ready to hook up to Redd.
While the doctors and nurses shouted over each other giving orders and instructions, Kopsas-Kingsley calmly talked with Redd.
She formed a bond between first responders in those brief minutes.
“He could talk pretty well to me, so we talked about his kids, his tattoos. Anything I could talk to him about to make him calm,” she said. “We talked about his lovely lady, as I called her. That he’s a firefighter. Whatever we could talk about to calm the situation down.”
At the end of those 17 minutes, it was time to intubate Redd.
“Intubation means we’re going to sedate you; we’re going to put a breathing tube into your mouth, into your lungs and put you on life support - on a breathing machine,” Kopsas-Kingsley said.
“Right before I started to push the first med, he grabbed my hand and looks at me and said, ‘You’re going to wake me up?’” she said, remembering Redd’s look of concern on his face. “He’s like, ‘I got to get through this.’
“I’m said, ‘Bud, we’re going to work together. We’re going to make this happen.’”
Truth be told, Redd doesn’t remember much of that.
“I vaguely remember them telling me they’re going to put me down,” Redd said, “and I was not feeling very well, and I thought, ‘Good. I get to rest.’”
For nearly two weeks before arriving at IU Health University Hospital, Redd had been losing his fight with COVID-19, which he suspects he caught while working because other firefighters on his shift also became sick around Nov. 25.
By Dec. 8 - the day he went to IU Health Arnett Hospital in Lafayette and was transferred to Indianapolis - Redd, an EMT, knew he needed help.
“On the 8th, I just could not get above 88 (percent blood-oxygen levels), and that’s not good,” he said.
Redd’s day wasn’t going to get better after they intubated him, either.
It takes a while to stabilize someone who’s recently been intubated, Kopsas-Kingsley said.
About two hours after doctors sedated Redd, Kopsas-Kingsley was in his room checking on him. She noticed his blood pressure suddenly drop, then his pulse stopped.
“I jumped on his chest, and I yelled for a medical alert,” Kopsas-Kingsley said. “Before I know it, there are 10 people in the room and I’m doing CPR.
“We got him back in the first two minutes of CPR,” she said. “I think the thing that helped him is how athletically fit he is.
“After it happened, one of the respiratory therapists … she came to me and said, ‘You realize you were yelling at Jim while you were doing CPR?’” Kopsas-Kingsley said.
“I was like, ‘What?’
“’You were yelling at him,” the respiratory therapist continued. “You were telling him that he had to live. He’s got five kids, and you were yelling his wife’s name.’
”You were pretty angry at Jim, telling him his heart had to start beating,‘” the therapist told her.
“I had no idea,” she said.
Redd was the lucky one that day.
“We had three cardiac arrests,” she said about that day. “Sadly, out of those three, Jim’s the only one that’s still alive.”
When Redd coded, Kopsas-Kingsley remembered thinking, “From a first responder to a first responder, we need to save this guy because he saves other people. How many people are not going to get saved if this firefighter doesn’t make it?”
After her shift, Kopsas-Kingsley had her days off for the week.
“When I came back, he’s not in ICU,” she said. “Sadly, a lot of times, that means he died.
“I didn’t want to ask because I didn’t want to know he hadn’t make it.”
During Kopsas-Kingsley’s days off, Redd hovered between life and death, consciousness and sedation, and he got better. They moved him out of ICU.
After he was moved out of ICU, he learned he coded during a phone call to his wife, Lori.
“She goes, ‘I don’t know if you know what happened,’” Redd said.
“What happened?” he asked.
“’You coded,’” he recalled his wife breaking the news to him. “’They had to do CPR.’”
It’s common for a patient to suffer a broken or cracked rib when someone receives CPR, but Redd didn’t feel any soreness.
“My first comment, we’ll he must not have done compressions very good because I don’t feel like my chest hurts,” Redd said, not realizing at the time that a woman performed the life-saving procedure.
“They told me about her,” Redd said, “and I told them I’d love to meet her.”
Kopsas-Kingsley learned Redd survived, which was a relief, but she resisted the first suggestion for her to go visit him because he was asking to meet her. Too busy, she told herself, but Redd persisted.
With a little nudging from a doctor, Kopsas-Kingsley tracked down Redd in his new room.
“It’s very rare that I get to see my patients survive, let alone want to meet me,” she said.
Redd had no idea who she was.
“They all look the same because they have all that garb on,” Redd said.
“I walked into his room, I’m like, ‘What’s up, brother?’ ” Kopsas-Kingsley said. “He’s like, ‘Hey.’ He had no idea who I was.
“‘What happened?’” Kopsas-Kingsley remembered Redd asking her after she introduced herself.
She told Redd how he coded the day he arrived and how they brought him back.
“He starts crying,” she said. “I’m thinking, ‘Ah, hell. I’m going to start crying.’”
They both cried for a while, then Kopsas-Kingsley had to go back to work.
Kopsas-Kingsley admits that CPR is one of her strengths, but Redd also was saved by the fact that it was shift change. That meant there were double the number of nurses and doctors working when Redd coded.
“It was the right place, right time, right people. And the fact that Jim is so athletically fit … I think that really helped,” she said.
During an interview Jan. 12, Kopsas-Kingsley was not aware that Redd had been released from the hospital on New Year’s Day and was convalescing at his rural Tippecanoe County home near Shadeland.
Redd lost between 35 and 40 pounds since he caught COVID-19. He might put on a brave face, but his weakness can be heard in his shortness of breaths.
“My lungs are about 50 percent capacity,” Redd said after an appointment with a pulmonologist.
His blood-oxygen levels are around 93 or 94 when he’s not moving around, and about 89 when he walks around, Redd said. That’s not great, he admits, but he’s using less oxygen, so that’s a positive.
“It could be two months,” he said when asked about returning to work.” It could be three before I can go back to making runs like I was before.”
Redd joined the West Lafayette Fire Department when he was 36. He’s now 58. Work is the reason he was fit.
“It’s a young man’s game that I’m in,” he said, “and I’m not a young man anymore, so I have to work a little bit harder than everyone else.
“You don’t want to be the weak link.”
Redd didn’t have any of the underlying conditions that make COVID-19 more dangerous. In fact, he said he had no health issues.
“Obviously, being healthy, eating healthy, keeping the body healthy apparently is a huge factor,” he said of his survival.
“I know people younger than me that have had bad experiences,” he said. “You just never know.
“If it can affect me the way it did, it can affect anybody.”
His advice to avoid the virus - besides being physically fit - is what every other health-care professional has preached for the better part of 2020.
Wear a mask and keep your distance from other people.
Don’t touch your face.
Frequently wash your hands.
Words cannot adequately explain the bond between Kopsas-Kingsley and Redd - two first responders.
“It’s not in our DNA to be the weak link,” Redd said. “We try to help people and be the one that is able to help.
“She was there for me. That connection will always be there.”
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Source: Journal & Courier
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