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Every day, BWHers do all they can to save lives and care for patients at the hospital. Recently, nurses Moira McCarthy-Egan and Susan Toto instinctively relied on their invaluable clinical skills and compassion to rescue two people in need beyond the walls of BWH.
Susan Toto, BSN, RN, BC, felt her nursing instincts kick in during a drive home from the beach in August when she noticed continuous honking from a car strangely parked at an assisted living facility.
“I got to the next intersection and turned around. Something just didn’t feel right about the way the car was parked,” said Toto, who had taken a longer than usual route home to Yarmouth while her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Katie slept in the back seat. “I pulled back into the lot, and a woman ran towards my car screaming that her mother had suffered a heart attack.”
Toto, who has worked on the Cardiac Surgery Step Down Unit for five years, ran to the car to find an 84-year-old woman slumped over in the passenger seat.
“She was pulseless and not breathing. I started giving her CPR and mouth-to-mouth right away,” said Toto, noting that it was the first time outside of the hospital she had administered CPR. She directed the woman’s daughter to call 911 and retrieve an automated external defibrillator (AED) from inside the assisted care facility.
Minutes later, a nursing assistant and nurse came out with an AED. “We shocked the woman once, and she was alive. The ambulance came soon after and took her to Cape Cod Hospital,” Toto said.
The woman made a full recovery and is now in Florida for the winter with her husband of 59 years.
Toto reflects on the incident with awe. “It was such an overwhelming experience because there were these three generations of women in the car driving home from the beach, just like me and my own daughter were,” she said. “The heart attack victim’s granddaughter was 10 years old, but she focused her attention on my daughter Katie.”
Toto felt she was in the right place at the right time. “I was just doing what I’m supposed to do. If I were in the hospital, I would have done same thing,” she said.
When Moira McCarthy-Egan, BSN, RN, drove away from the Emergency Department after a 4-to-midnight shift last month, her work wasn’t done.
McCarthy-Egan, who graduated from UMass-Boston in June and began training as a newly-licensed nurse in August, was driving in heavy traffic near Savin Hill Avenue on Interstate 93 South on her way home to Weymouth, when a car in front of her starting driving erratically.
“Three cars changed lanes to avoid him, so it was just me behind this car,” she said. The driver unsuccessfully tried to change lanes, rear-ended another car and crashed into an overpass. McCarthy-Egan immediately stopped her car as others whizzed past.
“I got out and ran to him. He was stunned and looked straight ahead. I asked him what happened, and he didn’t reply, so I told him we had to get out,” she said. McCarthy-Egan pulled the man out of the car as flames engulfed the engine.
“I sat him down on the side of the expressway and waved down an ambulance to get him help,” said McCarthy-Egan, who worked as a community resource specialist at the Boston Visiting Nurses Association for a decade before shifting careers to nursing.
“The car was totally engulfed in flames,” she said. Both police and firefighters were called to the scene to douse the flames.
The entire scenario played out in approximately 40 minutes, but it felt like seconds to McCarthy-Egan. “I didn’t think when I stopped my car,” she said. “Afterwards, I thought, ‘The car could have blown up, and I could have gotten hit.’ I’m sure others would have done the same thing.”