The quick-thinking actions of passerbys has saved the life of a man who was found unconscious and bleeding from the head along the Noosa River pathway.
A defibrillator located at The Boathouse in Noosaville has now saved two lives, with paramedics calling the recent events that followed James Ainslie’s heart attack “a miracle“.
Noosa local Lisa Smith used her sports medicine training to take over CPR from Julie Pyne who was first on the scene.
“I was walking as I always do every morning along the river and I saw in the distance that a man had fallen to the ground a lady sitting over him,“ she said.
“The closer I got, I could see she was doing CPR and she was doing press compressions and I asked if I could help.
“I could see the man had fallen down and cracked his head as there was blood on the path.“
Lisa said as she moved around to take over the CPR from Julie, she checked the status of James and noticed he was unresponsive and blue.
“I immediately started more aggressive CPR. What Julie had done was terrific but the situation needed a more aggressive approach,“ she said.
“I basically did compressions for close to five minutes and during that time a number of people had started to assist. You could tell he had an obstructed airway. We thought we had him a couple of times but he obviously needed a little bit more intervention so we had to continue with compressions.“
A lady riding past then jumped on her bike to The Boathouse and brought back a defibrillator.
“While we were continuing CPR we then instructed her on how to prepare the defibrillator,“ Lisa said.
“They are very user-friendly but if you’ve never used one before it can be hard to do it quickly in a pressured environment. Unfortunately I’ve had to do it three times now and I worked for thirty years in medicine so I’m quite aware of what has to be done.
“We got a reaction from him and we could tell we got him back. We lost him a couple times and got him back so that was good.“
About four minutes after they shocked James, the ambulance arrived and took over.
“He was a lucky man. It wasn’t his time to go. There were too many good people around him helping,“ Lisa said.
“His wife rang me and the ambulance and they said it was a great result and called it a miracle.“
James’s daughter, Tori Aufderheide, said there were many people she wanted to thank.
“I want to thank Julie Pyne, Lisa Smith, there was also a deputy principal from one of the schools who rode down and got the defibrillator and the people at The Boathouse, and the ambulance officers. I’m grateful for the whole lot of them,“ Tori said.
She said James was still in hospital but was awake and talking.
“He’s got a long road to recovery but he is doing a lot better than he was on Thursday that’s for sure,“ she said.
Noosa Rotary Tess Alexandroff said the Rotary Club have provided several defibrillators along Gympie Terrace.
“We’ve purchased six defibrillators over the past 12 months positioned along the river and other places,“ she said.
“The shame is that there is no signage up and people don’t know where they are. If we could do something about that aspect that would be fantastic because lifesaving is what we’re about.“
