David Hedrick set out in a drizzling rain Friday morning to buy a used car for his 19-year-old son.
That trip would not have happened if employees at his gym had not been trained to use the defibrillator they installed just weeks before he had a massive heart attack July 19.
Hedrick, now 55, addressed a seminar of first responders later that day in Rockville and expressed his gratitude at having a second chance at life.
“Like most men my age I hadn’t had a full medical checkup in probably 20 years,” he said.
As he ran on the YMCA treadmill in Silver Spring last summer, Hedrick’s heart suddenly failed, and the still moving treadmill threw him across the room into another piece of exercise equipment.
“I got burns on my face from where it rested on the moving belt,” he said. “I don’t remember any of this.”
Gym employees initiated CPR and began using the defibrillator on him until paramedics arrived to take up his care.
Since then, four more people in cardiac arrest were saved by the devices across the county.
At the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service seminar on public access defibrillators, fire and rescue workers, and medical experts discussed the merits of thecounty’s installation and training program, initiated in June 2005.
Now nearly 500 of the devices, which administer a low-grade electric jolt to stop a heart from seizing, have been stationed in public buildings, community centers and senior centers around the county, said fire spokesman Pete Piringer.
Gyms, condo associations and municipalities like Friendship Heights have installed the devices or are considering doing so.
“It’s a no-brainer really,” said fire chief Tom Carr. “It’s not a big financial investment anymore.”
The machines cost about $1,000, and training much less than that.
Though he did not have details about funding for the program in 2007, Carr said they will have all county facilities covered by 2008.
In the wake of his brush with death, Hedrick, a conference center manager, said he has trained in CPR and in the use of defibrillators.
“It takes a person willing to pull it off the wall and willing to start CPR,” he said.
