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Nov. 20--Friday's Christmas City of the North Parade ended early for Sandra Merritt. Instead of finishing the route, she stopped to save a life.
Merritt, a Duluth firefighter who was off duty, was on an antique fire truck with her 7-year-old son, Trey, she said. It was about 6:45 p.m., and the truck had just taken the left turn from Lake Avenue to Superior Street. Merritt was waving at people from the back. In front of Minnesota Power, she noticed a woman on the ground, with a man holding a cell phone to her face. Merritt said she hesitated. No one seemed upset, and no one was flagging down the firefighters for help.
But she told another off-duty firefighter, "I'll feel better if I just walk over there and hear that she's OK."
She quickly found that the woman was in cardiac arrest, unresponsive. The man had been holding a cell phone to her face to see if she was breathing. Merritt yelled to the on-duty firefighters in the next truck to come with their medical bags. She started CPR, pressing on the woman's chest for one set of 30 repetitions, "and she started breathing," Merritt said.
"I just kept talking to her and telling her she was going to be OK," Merritt said.
But she doesn't know the end of the story. The woman was breathing but still unresponsive when she was taken in an ambulance.
It dawned on her then, Merritt said, that her son was still in the antique fire truck. They were reunited at the Central Fire Station after the parade.
Merritt, 46, has been a Duluth firefighter for 13 years and served in the Superior Fire Department for one year before that. She frequently performs CPR, she said, and has done so a couple of times while off duty. But this experience was an emotional one for her, she said.
"There was this chance in my mind that I almost didn't get off the rig. What if I didn't?"
