A genteman in his 60s was lifting weights next to me… I was standing a few feet away from him, with my back turned as I was racking my dumbells, and I heard him say “oh, shit!” in what did not sound like a terribly alarmed manner. I did not hear him hit the ground. When I turned around a few seconds later, and he was lying on the weight floor with his head underneath the dumbell rack. I approached him, his eyes were open but he was totally unresponsive, and he was gasping and making horrible snoring noises.
I knew it was bad, so I sprinted to the front desk and told the girl to call an ambulance and tell them to get here NOW. Then the manager and I ran back downstairs to find him turning purple and foaming at the mouth. The manager, who assured everybody that she was trained in CPR, monitored his breathing and pulse, and kept telling me that his breathing and heart rate were strong… and that she didn’t want to move him because “he IS breathing and I don’t want to change anything.”
But that didn’t mesh with what I was seeing, because he was turning totally fucking purple and just gasping occasionally. I told the manager that I didn’t think he was breathing, but she kept her hands on his pulse and kept reassuring me that his vital signs felt “real good.” His hands were turning purple, his gasps and gutteral noises became less frequent and I was stressing the fuck out big time.
Well, evidently the manager doesn’t know what the hell a pulse is supposed to feel like, because when the paramedics arrived, they took one fucking look at him, determined he did NOT have a pulse after all and started doing CPR. I was sitting there watching them pump his chest, waching his abdomen distend, and he just looked like a totally dead sack of flesh. Then they whipped out their defibrillator and shocked him to no avail. I never felt sicker in my life, and while they continued pumping his chest and working on him, all I could think about was that I was watching the final moments of a man’s existence. And it wasn’t fascinating at all, but instead was one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen.
But, thankfully, one lucky blast from the defibrillator finally did manage to jump-start his heart, and although he never regained conciousness, he eventually did start breathing on his own again, and then they took him off to the hospital. Said it was probably a heart attack. I hope to God he doesn’t have brain damage because nobody did CPR before the paramedics arrived.