A man who visited Mount Everest Base Camp to install a defibrillator as part of his advocacy work has revealed the device saved a woman’s life just three weeks after he left Nepal.
David Sullivan is the founder of Code Blue CPR, an organization that trains defibrillator use and CPR skills at home and around the world.
Earlier this year, the 62-year-old from Surrey ventured to the Himalayas where he installed what he says is the world’s highest defibrillator. Climbers die on Everest all the time—not always of cardiac arrest—but certainly sometimes, and the use of a defibrillator within the first 3 minutes of a heart attack can improve survival rates from 8% to over 50%.
Climbing to an altitude of 22,000 feet to test the defibrillator, Sullivan then descended to one of the villages near Everest Base Camp, at just over 16,500 feet, to install the device for use.
He returned from Everest on April 30th and, just three weeks later, learned that it saved a young climber’s life after her heart stopped.
“It was the proudest moment of my life when I learned what had happened,” Sullivan told the Southwest News Service. “It was last Friday (May 23rd), at around 3:45 a.m. I have kids traveling the world so I initially thought, ‘oh my God, something’s happened.’”
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“But it was a sherpa who told me the defibrillator had been activated and had saved a 30-year-old French woman’s life. I hope it will help people realize how important it is to have access to defibrillators.”
David Sullivan gave several CPR training courses to locals at a village on the slopes of Mount Everest – credit, David Sullivan / SWNS
Sullivan began his advocacy work after he lost four close friends—all under the age of 45— to cardiac arrest, and while he was in Nepal, he also gave multiple CPR and defibrillator classes to the locals who had never had access to training before.
Now that he’s back in the UK, Sullivan is preparing to present a training program to the government which would see 1.2 million children across London trained in CPR.
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“We want every school to have a new defibrillator and every person in the school— students, teachers, staff—to have all the training necessary to save someone’s life,” he told SWNS. “I performed nine minutes of CPR for a young lad and used a defibrillator just three months after I had been shown how to.”
“While I was doing this, around 30 people just watched and didn’t help because they didn’t know how,” he remembered. “When the lad’s mum called me the next day to say he was alive, it changed my life forever.”
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