SPRINGDALE — A city Fire Department captain saw a familiar face recently, just not one he had seen alive.
Dean Bitner saw Lawrence “Ray” Bartlett at an auction, and remembered him from a medical call 20 years earlier.
“’The last time I saw you, you were dead,’” Bitner said he told Bartlett.
Bartlett, now 74, had a heart attack at his home on Emma Avenue. Bitner and firefighters Dave Creek, Marty Thiesse and Tom Jopling responded to the call.
By The Numbers
Emergency Medical Calls
The Springdale Fire Department handled 1,000 more emergency medical calls last year than five years previously.
Year Number
2012 6,207
2011 5,566
2010 5,536
2009 5,336
2008 5,191
Source: Springdale Fire Department
Bartlett met with Bitner, Creek and Thiesse on Thursday, seeing Creek and Thiesse for the first time since his heart attack. Bartlett said he didn’t remember any of them.
“I lost 12 days,” Bartlett said. “I don’t remember two days before and 10 days after.”
All Bartlett knows about his attack is what people have told him, he said. He was carrying a child his wife was baby-sitting to the backyard. He stopped and returned for a cup of coffee.
“My wife said she heard the child start crying,” Bartlett said. “When she went back inside, I was on the floor and the child was crying beside me.”
The Fire Department sent an ambulance and a fire truck. Three of the four men dispatched were paramedics. Bitner was an emergency medical technician.
“I’ll never forget it,” Bitner said to Bartlett. “You were laying on the floor of your living room with the children crying around you.”
Bartlett had no pulse and was not breathing. Blood had started to pool in the lowest parts of his body, Bitner said.
The men used a Lifepak 5 to shock his heart to start it beating again, then loaded him in the ambulance. They weren’t hopeful, Thiesse said.
“When they are that far along, you don’t bring too many back,” Thiesse said. “You don’t have a lot of successes.”
Doctors told Bartlett he was shocked back to life four times, he said. Eventually, he returned home and went back to work.
When Bartlett met the men who saved his life, they showed him one of the old life packs. It could have been the one used on him, Bitner said. There is no record of which of three packs was used on that ambulance.
They also showed him one of the new packs recently purchased. The department purchased six Physio-Control LifePak 15 monitors, one for each ambulance. The total cost was $265,194.
The new packs replace 10-year-old ones that were about worn out, said Jim Vaughan, division chief. The old packs were used so long, the cost amortized out to $2 to $3 per patient they were used on, Vaughan said.
The new packs are more rugged, Vaughan said, and should be able to survive the workload.
“We use those monitors on almost every EMS call,” Vaughan said. “They lead a tough life.”
The packs include more monitoring capabilities, including for carbon monoxide. Like the previous packs, these can send heart monitoring information to emergency rooms.
A few other Springdale residents have survived after defibrillation as long as Bartlett, including the most famous one: MacKenzie Phillips.
Phillips, a Springdale Bulldog, went down on the football field during a 1986 Springdale-Fayetteville game.
Creek was on the team that shocked Phillips’ heart back to life. Phillips later played for the Arkansas Razorbacks.
Being a firefighter “is the best job you can have,” Bitner said. “It’s stories like these that make it that way,” he said.