“I was just in the right place at the right time, that’s all it was,” says East Marion Fire Department volunteer Gregory Wallace.
Wallace, a Riverhead High School physics teacher, was in the stands in the Riverhead High School gymnasium last night for an annual fundraising event called “Crazy Sports Night,” cheering on his wife Linda and her colleagues at Phillips Avenue Elementary School in a tug of war contest against Aquebogue Elementary. The event pits teachers and staff from each school in the Riverhead district against one another in a variety of madcap sports competitions. As the tug-of-war match ended, the Phillips’ team anchor man, fourth-grade teacher Lonnie Hughes, collapsed.
The East Marion FD ex-chief sprang into action, racing to the teacher’s side. Another vol in the stands, Center Moriches Fire Department member James Nizza, had already begun chest compressions.
“So I ran to the ambulance [stationed outside the high school for the event] to get the manual defibrillator and monitors,” Wallace recalled in a phone interview this morning.
When he raced back to the stricken teacher, Wallace found Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps advanced life support provider Jennifer Kelly already at the patient’s side.
Kelly had been in the stands with her nephew, a Riley Avenue Elementary School student.
“I saw Mr. Hughes go down,” she recalled this morning. She immediately made her way down to the gym floor.
An RVAC crew in the corner of the crowded gym couldn’t see what had happened right away, Kelly said.
“I’ve known that man my whole life,” Kelly said. He was a teacher in Pulaski Street Elementary School when she was a student there in fourth and fifth grade more than 20 years ago, she said.
“When you live and work and volunteer in the town where you were born and raised, you know everyone,” said Kelly, a 14-year veteran of the ambulance corps.
As the EMTs prepared to apply the paddles that they hoped would shock Hughes’ heart back to a normal rhythm, Phillips Avenue teachers, dressed in their team’s bright orange tees, “calmly formed a ring around us,” Wallace recalled. They were soon joined by teachers from other schools clad in their own bright shirts of blue, red, yellow, and green, forming a kind of rainbow of protection around their fallen colleague and the EMTS working feverishly to save his life.
“Everyone was aware that this was unfolding in front of a lot of kids,” Kelly said. “Everyone wanted to protect them from seeing anything. I started yelling to clear the gym.”
Greenberger asked the crowd to leave the gym and everyone quickly cooperated.
Wallace and Kelly both said EMTs, for all their training and skill, never really know if CPR will save the patient’s life. For Wallace, a CPR instructor, who’s been trained in CPR for 20 years, this was his first save ever.
“You just do what you are trained to do. You don’t think about anything else,” Wallace said.
Fortunately, last night, the paddles did the trick. Hughes’ heart rhythm was restored, his life saved.
Hughes regained consciousness in the RVAC ambulance rig as it transported him to Peconic Bay Medical Center, with Wallace and Kelly still at his side.
“He looked at me and said, ‘You’re Pat Kelly’s daughter. I don’t know which one, but I know’ and I laughed,” Kelly said. Her sister, Kimberly Kelly Pokorny, is also an EMT with RVAC. Her father Pat, “the voice of the Blue Waves” a sportscaster for WRIV radio, “is like the mayor of Riverhead,” she said.
Hughes was talking and laughing in the emergency room with the EMTs who brought him there, according to RVAC Chief Joseph Oliver.
This morning, Wallace said he felt elated by how things turned out last night.
“This a prime example of what good training, great CPR and the defibrillator can do,” Wallace said. “We did what we’re supposed to and it’s how you save somebody,” he reflected.
Hughes, 57, is listed in critical condition at Stony Brook University Hospital, according to a hospital spokesman. He was transferred there last night from Peconic Bay Medical Center.
