Phillips Avenue Elementary School fourth grade teacher Lonnie Hughes remains in critical condition today at Stony Brook University Hospital after collapsing in cardiac arrest at a school athletic event last night at Riverhead High School.
Hughes, 57, had just competed in a tug of war match with his Phillips Avenue colleagues during the annual “Crazy Sports Night” when he fell to the gymnasium floor.
A Stony Brook University Hospital spokesman this morning said Hughes is listed in critical condition after being transferred from Peconic Bay Medical Center last night.
Quick action by emergency medical technicians in the gymnasium saved the teacher’s life. See prior story.
“I was just in the right place at the right time, that’s all it was,” said Riverhead High School physics teacher Gregory Wallace, an EMT-CC (critical care) and volunteer with the East Marion Fire Department.
“I was sitting in the stands with my children, rooting for the Phillips team,” Wallace said. His wife, Linda, is also a fourth grade teacher at Phillips. She was competing with the Phillips team at the annual fundraising event pitting teachers and staff from each school against one another in a variety of madcap sports competitions.
He heard the voice of Crazy Sports Night emcee Jeff “Doc” Greenberger on the loudspeaker saying EMTs were needed on the gymnasium floor, Wallace said.
When Wallace got to Hughes, he found Center Moriches Fire Department volunteer James Nizza had already begun chest compressions.
“So I ran to the ambulance [stationed outside the high school for the event] to get the manual defibrillator and monitors,” Wallace said.
When he raced back to the stricken teacher, Wallace found Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps advanced life support provider Jennifer Kelly already at his side.
Kelly had been in the stands with her nephew, a Riley Avenue Elementary School student.
“I saw Mr. Hughes go down,” she recalled this morning. She immediately made her way down to the gym floor.
An RVAC crew in the corner of the crowded gym couldn’t see what had happened right away, Kelly said.
“I’ve known that man my whole life,” Kelly said. He was a teacher in Pulaski Street Elementary School when she was a student there in fourth and fifth grade more than 20 years ago, she said.
“When you live and work and volunteer in the town where you were born and raised, you know everyone,” said Kelly, a 14-year veteran of the ambulance corps.
As the EMTs prepared to apply the paddles that they hoped would shock Hughes’ heart back to a normal rhythm, Phillips Avenue teachers, dressed in their team’s bright orange tees, “calmly formed a ring around us,” Wallace recalled. They were soon joined by teachers from other schools clad in their own bright shirts of blue, red, yellow, and green, forming a kind of rainbow of protection around their fallen colleague and the EMTS working feverishly to save his life.
“Everyone was aware that this was unfolding in front of a lot of kids,” Kelly said. “Everyone wanted to protect them from seeing anything. I started yelling to clear the gym.”
Greenberger asked the crowd to leave the gym and everyone quickly cooperated.
Wallace and Kelly both said EMTs, for all their training and skill, never really know if CPR will save the patient’s life. For Wallace, a CPR instructor, who’s been trained in CPR for 20 years, this was his first save ever.
“You just do what you are trained to do. You don’t think about anything else,” Wallace said.
Fortunately, last night, the paddles did the trick. Hughes’ heart rhythm was restored, his life saved.
Hughes regained consciousness in the ambulance, with Wallace and Kelly still at his side.
“He looked at me and said, ‘You’re Pat Kelly’s daughter. I don’t know which one, but I know’ and I laughed,” Kelly said. Her sister, Kimberly Kelly Pokorny, is also an EMT with RVAC. Her father Pat, “the voice of the Blue Waves” a sportscaster for WRIV radio, “is like the mayor of Riverhead,” she said.
Hughes was laughing and joking in the PBMC emergency room last night before being transferred to Stony Brook.
“He promised to buy us ice cream,” Kelly said this morning, a smile in her voice.
This morning, Wallace said he felt elated by how things turned out last night.
“This a prime example of what good training, great CPR and the defibrillator can do,” Wallace said. “We did what we’re supposed to and it’s how you save somebody,” he reflected.
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