Bystander performs CPR on stranger having heart attack
FARMINGDALE -- Two men who didn't know each other until a random encounter on the Long Island Rail Road are now bonded for life.
That's because a 50-year-old Farmingdale man who learned CPR as a Boy Scout was forced to use his skills on a fellow passenger having a heart attack.
"I mean, I was dead," Chris Marshall said. "I was not breathing. My heart was not beating. I was done."
But now, the 60-year-old Marshall is very much alive to talk about the incident, for two reasons. First, Bill Gerow suddenly remembered how to perform CPR 38 years after he first learned the life-saving technique.
"The last time I performed CPR was 1976, for my merit badge in the Boy Scouts," he said.
"Oh, he absolutely saved his life," said nurse practitioner Cathy Morimando, at Good Samaritan Hospital. "I believe he was in cardiac arrest, cardiac standstill from a life-threatening arrhythmia."
Secondly, there's fate. Both men got emotional when they realized during their reunion Tuesday that neither of them usually catch the LIRR train to Ronkonkoma.
"I wasn't on my normal train either," Marshall said. "I usually get the 6:41."
Marshall happened to be standing right near where Gerow was sitting Thursday, right before Gerow was supposed to get off in Farmingdale, when Marshall suddenly collapsed.
"I'd say after two reps, he still wasn't breathing," Gerow said. "So I had to do mouth-to-mouth with compressions. I want to say I had to do that a few times."
And then, when the doors opened and EMTs arrived, Gerow stood up, got a round of applause, gave a thumbs up and walked off the train.
"That's like unheard of, for a total stranger," Marshall said. "And then just walk away."
But Gerow couldn't sleep that night, wondering about the guy he tried to save.
And Chris' wife, Margaret Thompson-Marshall, wondered who was it that saved her husband? So she posted it on Facebook, and word got out.
"And when we checked into the hospital here, all the nurses had already seen it on their Facebook," Thompson-Marshall said.
The rest is history. It is no doubt the beginning of a beautiful friendship, or as Marshall sums it up, "He's a brother for life."
