Co-Workers Come Together to Save Colleague’s Life at Work

By Gina Mayfield

Three women standing next to each other.
The three individuals who provided heart-saving CPR & AED usage. (Left to Right: Carmen Christeleit, Katie Carbone, and Diane Mazza

Four hours after a new colleague arrived for his first day on the job with Buckhead Meat Co., he took a seat in the sales manager’s office for training. Just a few minutes later, the manager noticed his new hire had slumped over in his seat. “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” the manager started to yell, which alerted others in the area that something wasn’t quite right.

Diane Mazza, who happened to be nearby, passed the office, glanced in and instinctively knew to quickly grab the AED. When she returned, things had not improved. “He was still not moving. He had a blue hue to him,” she says. “I asked the sales manager and another bystander to put him on the ground.” She began CPR. “I figured I needed to get blood flowing to his brain. That’s all I’m thinking, I’ve got to get air into his lungs,” she recalls.

Diane could hear the 911 call in the background as she ripped off the man’s shirt, which revealed a large scar clearly indicating a surgical incision over his heart. Still, the 911 operator gave her permission to immediately began chest compressions and breaths. “I didn’t check for a pulse because I wasn’t sure if I could find it. My adrenaline was out of control,” Diane says. “I was going to just keep doing CPR until help arrived, because nobody wants to die at work.”

That help arrived in a coworker, Carmen Christeleit, who opened the AED. “I put on the pads and shocked him twice. We got nothing,” Diane says. Diane and Katie Carbone, another coworker who had stepped in to help, took turns performing CPR while a crowd had gathered just outside the windowed office willing their new colleague to just breathe.  

EMTs arrived in record speed and unloaded their AED. When asked if they wanted to take over, the EMTs responded that Diane and Katie were “doing a great job” and finished prepping their AED. An EMT soon took over CPR, while Katie continued breaths. Once the AED was set up, they administered a shock. The colleague jolted and looked up at Katie. “I called his name and he looked at me again, which was a great sign. He knew his name and what direction to look. He finally woke up,” she says.

EMTs loaded the survivor into the ambulance, but he lost consciousness again, then came back around and began speaking coherently. With lights and sirens, the ambulance took off for John F. Kennedy University Medical Center in Edison, New Jersey. But, come to find out, the survivor lived about an hour and a half away in Pennsylvania and was training to expand the sales territory in that direction.

Patricia Benjamin, another colleague, stayed with the survivor in the hospital as his wife, back in Pennsylvania, quickly worked the phones to arrange for medical transport. He continued to improve. “He was up, he was pink, which was fabulous to see, but I had never even met him before that moment,” Patricia says. “His personal belongings hadn’t made their way to him, he didn’t have his glasses, and he didn’t know anybody. We quickly became friends.”

The colleague, in his late 50s, knew that without his rescuers the call to his family would have gone very differently for his two young sons, aged 10 and 12. “He was very, very emotional and very thankful,” Patricia says. “Turned out that he had a pacemaker that did not have a defibrillator attached to it. Needless to say, it does now. But that was the thing, the pacemaker couldn’t restart without the defibrillator.”

Before being transported back home, the survivor jokingly told the nurse on duty that he felt like the luckiest man alive and was going to play the lottery numbers 5/20 for the rest of his life, referring to the date of his rescue. “Don’t be greedy,” she quipped with a smile. “You just won the lottery of life.”

Truth be told, he was extraordinarily fortunate to have been surrounded by trained rescuers at the moment of his cardiac arrest, and not alone at home as he was in the days leading up to his new job.

Buckhead Meat Co., a division of Sysco Food Service, offers regular on-site CPR training at no cost to employees and ensures people from each area of the building participate. Katie had attended a recent session that she says made a real impact. “It was the first time I’ve had formal CPR training, so obviously I’m very grateful that we were given that opportunity through Sysco because the training was fantastic. The mankin provided helpful feedback regarding rate and depth of compressions. The training definitely made a difference in this outcome.”

The AHA is committed to transforming a nation of bystanders into a Nation of Lifesavers. Join the movement that can make a difference in the life of someone’s partner, parent, friend, or family.