Student saves co-worker from heart attack

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Tim Kremers is a certified lifeguard at the RIT Student Life Center. While on co-op at an engineering company, he performed CPR on a co-worker having a heart attack.

Tim Kremers, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student, was hired for a co-op last spring because of his abilities as an engineer. When one of his co-workers suffered a sudden heart attack, however, it was the skills he had acquired from working as a lifeguard that proved to be the most valuable.

“I’ve had to save people in the water before, but until that day I had never needed to perform CPR,” said Kremers, a certified lifeguard of the RIT Student Life Center for the past four years. “It’s one of those skills that’s great to have but you hope you never have to use.”

Kremers worked as a product development engineer for a large engineering company based in Buffalo, N.Y. He had been working for the company for just over a month when one morning he heard someone yelling to call 9-1-1.

“People were running by my office, which wasn’t normal, so I got up to see what was going on,” said Kremers.

An associate ran over to Kremers’ desk and asked him if he knew CPR. Kremers said yes and followed the man to where everyone had been running. There, he found one of his co-workers lying face down with a crowd of people around him. The victim had told another worker that he felt like he was having a heart attack just moments before collapsing.

“I flipped him over and checked for signs of life,” said Kremers. “He had no pulse or breath, so I started to go into CPR.”

Kremers immediately performed two cycles of CPR on the man, but he remained unresponsive. After the second cycle, office security arrived on the scene with an automatic external defibrillator.

“We shocked him once and it didn’t do anything,” said Kremers. “Then [the AED] reanalyzed and we shocked him again, and the second time it brought him back.”

The man fell into a coma and was rushed to a nearby hospital. He awoke several days later with various rib injuries—one broken and three cracked—but suffered no permanent damage.

“If you’re doing CPR right, you’re supposed to crack at least one rib in order to compress hard enough,” said Kremers. “The doctor said that the only reason he survived was because I was there within about 30 seconds of him going down.”

The victim, who was in his early 60s, retired shortly after his recovery. Kremers added that the man was in good shape and had no history of serious health problems; the heart attack had come as a total surprise.

Kremers got his start as a lifeguard two years before coming to RIT at a YMCA near his hometown of Fairport, N.Y. He was inspired to become a lifeguard by his older brother, who was also a lifeguard, and by his mother, who was a swim instructor.

Derrick Hunt compiles “Student Spotlights” for University News. Contact him at djh9758@rit.edu with suggestions.