There was a car stopped in the middle of the road. Jason Mackintosh, contractor with Langwarrin Floor Sanding near Melbourne, Australia, driving the company van with his brother toward 970 square feet of rough Tasmanian oak, tooted his horn at the car a few times. There was no response, so he got out of the van. He walked up to the side of the car, tapped on the window and suddenly realized the man inside was having a heart attack. Mackintosh sprang into action. With the help of bystanders, he pulled the man out from the car and laid him on the ground. The group started CPR, with Mackintosh in charge of holding the man’s head. (Mackintosh had taken CPR training only the day before.) The man’s pulse grew faint until stopping entirely, just moments before two EMTs arrived with an ambulance. They saw the sorry state that the man was in and realized he would need all of their attention if he was going to make it, but with both of the EMTs in the back of the ambulance, who would drive? They asked Mackintosh, and he obliged, driving the ambulance through a rainstorm to the hospital while his brother tailed them in the company van. After Mackintosh dropped the man and EMTs off, he and his brother did what any professional would have done: “We went pretty much straight back to work,” he says. They were stunned, but Mackintosh was able to steady his hands and get the job done, and, more importantly, the man who had the heart attack made a full recovery.
