News, Weather and Sports for Lincoln, NE; KLKNTV.com
Great reporting by Jenn Schanz jschanz@klkntv.com:
“Bruce Benda and Buck Williams were looking forward to a day on the road with their motorcycles.
They had planned to ride to Branched Oak Lake, but took a detour in Pioneers Park on the way.
It was there, they saw a biker in desperate need of help.
“You could see there was no breathing, and there was really no distress, he was kind of just laying there curled up into a fetal position, and just…things weren’t right,” says Buck Williams, who performed CPR on the biker.
They thought the biker, a man they guessed was in his mid-fifties, may have had a heart attack.
While they waited for the ambulance to arrive, the two friends stayed by the mans side.
as Buck did CPR, Bruce comforted him.
“We made him as comfortable as we could, took his helmet off him. I put my sweatshirt underneath his head. Then we just proceeded to talk to him, tried to communicate with him. Let him know to hang on, that we were there,” says Bruce.
After minutes of compressions, Buck says the man had a pulse once the ambulance got there.
American Red Cross Training Specialist Sue Alby says it’s the first few minutes of a cardiac crisis that are key.
“For every minute a person goes without breathing, and essentially without a heartbeat, it can reduce their chance or survival by ten percent,” she says.
Buck and Bruce even made the trip to the hospital with the man, and visited him later that day.
Bruce says they don’t feel like heroes, they just did what anyone else would have done, looked out for one another.
The latest update on the biker is that he is critical, but stable condition. “
To get your American Red Cross CPR certification, call us at 916-538-6447 or click here to enroll in an upcoming CPR class.
