Two baseball fans who attended the Milwaukee Brewers vs. Washington Nationals game on June 11 saved the life of a man who went into cardiac arrest. According to the Washington Post, the two fans — 38-year-old fire department captain Jamie Jill and 32-year-old emergency room nurse Lindy Prevatt — didn’t know each other but came together to perform CPR on 58-year-old John Clements, who spent three nights in the hospital after a stent was placed in his right coronary.
“I’m remarkably better,” Clements said Tuesday, per USA Today. “The only pain I have is the pain that saved me. I can feel it in my chest plate from the CPR and the shocks. I’m better day by day, though. It’s pain that I can put up with for the rest of my life.”
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Jill and Prevatt were two sections down when they saw Clements going into cardiac arrest. Jill checked for a pulse but initially didn’t feel one. As the medical staff was alerted in the stadium, the ushers cleared two sections to give Jill and Prevatt enough space.
“I’ve obviously never met her, never worked with her, but it was like … someone that I’d been working with,” Jill told the Washington Post. “So we kind of worked seamlessly together and [were] hoping since we initiated CPR so quickly, we were going to give this guy the best shot we could possibly give for a good outcome. … Truthfully, when I do CPR as a first responder, oftentimes the outcome is not good.”
Jill and Prevatt performed CPR for 20 minutes. They also shocked Clements three times by using the ballpark’s defibrillator. Clements was shocked a fourth time by firefighters when they arrived. Nobody can choose where they go down,” Prevatt said. “But that was very difficult and probably the hardest place you could go down like that, to be able to access. But I’m thankful that I was there and also that I was the smallest, so I was able to at least get down and fit between the seat and the wall and do good CPR.”
Clements, who is a former helicopter pilot for the Army, doesn’t remember much about the incident. But he did say, “I was in the beyond. I was in the afterlife.” He went on to say that if you want to know who is going to win the World Series or Super Bowl, cut me a small check and I’ll relay that information.”
