PWILD crew leaders save man's life

<p>3 PWILD staff members helped save a man's life while scouting for campsites as part of the pre-orientation program.</p>

3 PWILD staff members helped save a man's life while scouting for campsites as part of the pre-orientation program.

Each year, more than 120 students spend two weeks hiking, swimming and climbing through the Pisgah National Forest as part of the pre-orientation program Project WILD. This August, some students in PWILD added a new activity: lifesaving.

When the trip began on Aug. 4, it was business as usual. The more than 80 freshmen in the program were divided into groups of six to eight, each accompanied by two or three experienced student crew leaders. All PWILD crew leaders are trained as wilderness first responders, which is essential in providing participants with a safe environment at times when they are seven or eight hours away from ambulance assistance, said 2015 PWILD co-director Savanna Hershman, a junior. Each of the crews are equipped with emergency kits to help manage any medical crisis that could arise during the trip. 

“We have the equipment to handle just about anything that could go wrong during the trip, but generally we only have to deal with injuries like blisters or small cuts,” said junior Iza Szawiola.

But three crew leaders—Szawiola and seniors Jared Schwartz and Kyrstin Lulow—saw their training put to a much more difficult test.

About halfway through the trip, Lulow, Schwartz and Szawiola were scouting campsites for their freshmen during a portion of the trip in which each participant spends 36 hours independent of the rest of the crew. The three students had gotten about two miles away from the small picnic area where they had left their crew when they noticed a man beside a small pond who appeared to be having a hard time breathing. As they passed him, the man went from leaning over and heaving to laying on the ground struggling to breathe.

Szawiola said that just as they started to realize something was seriously wrong, a young girl who was with the man started sprinting down the path. As she passed them, she repeated, “9-1-1.” 

The crew leaders rushed over to the man, who was also accompanied by a teenage boy and another friend, and started asking him questions. It soon became clear that there was a language barrier—the man spoke only French.  

After calling 911, Schwartz returned to the campsite where they had left the rest of their crew to retrieve the emergency pack. Szawiola and Lulow stayed with the man and assessed the situation by asking him a series of questions they had been trained to ask.

An initial round of questioning led them to believe that the man was suffering from a heat stroke or exhaustion, but the language barrier made it difficult to get direct answers through the family friend who acted as a translator. A second round of questioning, however, revealed that the man had previously had a reaction to a bee sting and that a yellow jacket sting may have caused this episode. 

“Almost at the same time, Kyrstin [Lulow] and I looked at each other and said ‘anaphylaxis,’ and that is when we realized just how serious the situation was,” Szawiola said.

Around that time, the man became so incapacitated by his inability to breathe that he was not able to speak at all. Lulow left to tell Schwartz how serious the situation was and to make sure he had the proper equipment.

“He was already sprinting back to us, but once he realized that the man was experiencing anaphlaxis, he started sprinting like someone’s life depended on it, and in some ways it really did,” Szawiola said.

As soon as Schwartz arrived with the emergency kit, Szawiola pulled out an ampule full of epinephrine and administered it to the man.

“Within 10 seconds, there was instant relief on the man’s face,” Szawiola said. “He could breathe again.”

In total, Schwartz had run about four miles to retrieve the kit and bring it back to the man. Fifteen minutes after the epinephrine had been administered, the ambulance arrived—by that time, the man was already back on his feet.

For precautionary measures, the man went to the hospital to be examined. While there, his wife ran into Hershman—who was helping an unrelated participant receive medical attention—and thanked her for the help that PWILD participants had given to her husband.

“She was hugging me and crying,” Hershman said. “It was just a really humbling experience for me to be a part of such an amazing organization.”

Despite playing a crucial role in saving the man’s life, none of the crew leaders ever learned the man’s name, nor do they have any way of getting in touch with him. The rest of the trip continued as planned with no disruptions to the schedule. 

Szawiola said the incident exemplified the goals of working together in a team and trusting the abilities of your co-leaders. 

“It was just a very PWILD moment,” Szawiola said. “And I am confident that any PWILD staffer who would had been there would have been able to do the same thing we did and have done it just as well.”

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