Elaine honoured for saving Australian politician

EARLY next month (provisionally Saturday September 10) 22-year-old Kildysart girl, Elaine O’Donoghue will be presented with an Australian version of the St John’s Ambulance Save a Life Award in her local community centre.
In the early hours of October 27 last year, Elaine and two backpacker friends were passing through Darwin Airport on their way to Cairns. Elaine had been working in the Australian Outback for seven months prior to her trip. Before that, she worked in a childcare centre in Perth from August 2009 until April 2010.
“We got to the airport at 2.30am,” Elaine recalled. “We were sitting around, chatting away and having a laugh. We were all excited going off to Cairns. Next thing I heard this big, huge thump on the ground.”
Elaine didn’t know it at the time but the man who had suffered a serious heart attack was retired education minister Fred Finch.
“I turned around and there was this guy gone purple in the face. I checked him for his pulse but he had none. So I immediately started CPR. There are certain positions you have to do in CPR like tilt their head back and make sure their airwaves are open and check for any sharp objects,” Elaine explained.
It took a while before she noticed but Elaine was covered in blood. 
“He had hit his head off the ground and he had cut himself on his temple and it was bleeding. While I was checking him, unknown to myself, I got covered in blood. But I brought him around once and put him into a recovery position but started losing him again. Again same story, I had to do the CPR. Thirty compressions and two breaths,” she remembers.
“That happened three times. Throughout the whole lot of that, someone off the flight that he was on threw a defibrillator down beside me. They didn’t even ask could I use it or not. Then a stranger, a lady, was watching what was going on. She said ‘can you use that?’ I said ‘I don’t know’. I wasn’t going messing with it because I wasn’t trained how to use a defibrillator. So I just left it there. I kept working on him anyway until the paramedics came. It took them about seven minutes. It wasn’t too bad but it felt a lot longer.” 
Elaine cleaned herself up in the bathroom and then had a few words with Fred’s wife, Lyn.
“She was there watching the whole lot of it. She was in total shock herself. I said ‘are you ok?’ She said ‘I’m fine’ but she was in total panic because the paramedics were still working on Fred. I said I had to go and catch my flight and said ‘talk to you later’. I never thought I’d see them ever again,” Elaine said.
Incredibly, Elaine had only two hours of CPR training in Perth behind her and that had taken place about a year before Fred Finch suffered his heart attack.
“The CPR training was through work. At the time, it was a bit of craic. It was actually interesting to do it and it obviously came in handy. When we did the course, we got a tiny little card. I keep it in my wallet still. It details five easy steps about what you do. Unknown to myself, I kept refreshing my memory,” Elaine said.
A few weeks later, Elaine returned to Kildysart in time for Christmas 2010. She hadn’t heard the last of Fred Finch though.
“I was at home about a month. It was about the first week in December and my aunt in Shannon was reading The Sunday World. She saw this tiny little article saying that that an ex-Australian government minister had been saved by a ‘mystery backpacker’. The only details I knew about Fred was his first name and that his age was 65,” Elaine said.
“We googled Fred Finch and the story came up in all the Australian papers. I couldn’t get over it. So we got in contact with him anyway. He was delighted. He was dying to meet me again. So I went out in March to meet him and I spent a week with him and then I caught up with a few friends,” she added.
While visiting Fred and his family, Elaine met the St John’s Ambulance crew that were on duty that night at Darwin Airport.
“Fred had got in contact with everyone that helped him on that day. We took pictures and they asked my about my experience. Then he put me up for a Save a Life Award through St John’s Ambulance in Australia. I was nominated and I was accepted for it about a month ago.”
While Elaine is very grateful that she underwent CPR training in Perth, she feels that non-medical professionals should be ‘debriefed’ if they are involved in administering CPR.
“I had a bit of a chat with them. Basically, I said that the training St John’s Ambulance do for CPR and first aid is brilliant but I said that one thing they need to raise awareness of is that people need to get debriefings. The likes of me, who wouldn’t be medically trained, need some debriefings,” Elaine believes.
Now working part-time in a crèche in Tiermaclane, Elaine does remember one light moment from that late-night incident in Darwin.
“As I was going through security, they pulled me over for a bomb test. They started swabbing me and everything. While they were swabbing me they were asking ‘so what happened over there?’ They just pulled me over for the bit of news to see what had happened,” Elaine laughed.
On a less light yet understand note, Elaine is often a bit wary when in the company of a large crowd of elderly people.
“At the back of my mind I’d think, ‘I hope they don’t drop’,” she said.
Elaine is planning to visit Fred Finch and his family again next year, when a second ceremony will be held to mark her role in saving his life.