A British supermarket cashier saved a customer’s life earlier this month by humming a 1970s classic Bee Gees song for 23 minutes while performing CPR.
According to the Manchester Evening News, Gayle Tomlinson, 38, an employee at ASDA in Rossington, used the beat of “Stayin’ Alive” to perform CPR on 54-year-old Nigel Gronous.
Gronous had gone into cardiac arrest while in a self-checkout line and stopped breathing, the supermarket chain said in a news release.
Tomlinson, who has worked at the store for three years, called for an ambulance and began using a defibrillator on Gronous while waiting for first responders.
“The defibrillator kept analyzing his heart rhythms and continued to tell me to keep doing CPR and then it said ‘shock required’ so we stood back and then continued CPR,” Tomlinson said in the news release. “At this point, he still wasn’t breathing. We carried on, really determined, and then there was a lady there who was a carer who jumped in for me at the very end and did three or four compressions and he started to take gasps for air.
“There was just sheer relief when he started to breathe again, and the paramedics arrived at that point.”
According to the UK Resuscitation Council, the chest should be compressed at a rate of 100-120 compressions per minute during hands-on CPR. “Stayin’ Alive” has 103 beats per minute, according to the BBC.
Gronous, a heavy goods vehicle mechanic, said he did not remember going into cardiac arrest.
“I don’t remember any of it at all, only what I’ve been told by ((my wife) Vicki, Gayle and the store manager Justin McRae. They have been filling in the blanks,” Gronous said in the news release. “All I remember is standing in the queue for self-checkout and the next thing I was in Doncaster Royal Infirmary.
“I’d like to thank everyone at the store and the customers who helped me and looked after Vicki on that day.”
“What Gayle did was brilliant and incredible -- she saved a person’s life,” McRae said. “Not all superheroes wear capes; this one wears green. The team here at Rossington and myself are all in awe of what Gayle did.”
Tomlinson said she reacted on instinct.
“I didn’t have time to think about it -- I just did it,” Tomlinson said in a statement. “I haven’t done anything special -- I just did what anyone else would have done in that situation. I was just in the right place at the right time.
“It was such a shock as one minute he was there and the next minute he wasn’t.”
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