Nurse Credited for Saving Man’s Life with CPR and Defibrillator After Heart Attack in Charlotte Airport

Nurse Credited for Saving Man’s Life with CPR and Defibrillator After Heart Attack in Charlotte Airport

Like so many victims, the first sign that Ken Jeffries was vulnerable to heart disease was a heart attack—suffered when the 57-year-old was at the airport waiting for a flight.

Collapsing to the floor of the Charlotte Douglas Int. Airport, he has his lucky stars to thank for his flight being bound for Knoxville—the same place that Claire Cerbie, a registered nurse from a heart and vascular hospital center in Charlotte, North Carolina, was going.

Cerbie told news media that it was the way he was breathing and snoring that alerted her to the heart attack.

With a makeshift orderly staff of airport bystanders, Cerbie administered CPR while someone went to get a defibrillator.

“We put the pads on him,” Cerbie told WBTV News. “It indicated a shockable rhythm, and it shocked him in between while we were doing compressions.”

After he recovered his own pulse, Jefferies was rushed to the Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center where Dr. William Downey, a cardiologist at the Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute, where Cerbie actually works, performed life-saving surgery.

Neither nurse nor doctor believed Jeffries would have survived if not for the CPR and shocks administered by Cerbie and the good Samaritans who helped.

“It’s a miracle that I was at that place at that time when it happened and the people around me are there,” Jeffries said on TV when interviewed alongside Cerbie. “A ‘thank you’ is not enough, Claire. Thank you for what you did I am so appreciative and indebted to you.”

“I’m very glad that I was there that day to help you out. I’d obviously do it again in a heartbeat,” Cerbie responded. “I’m so happy to see that you’re doing so well.”

Cerbie was upgraded to first class on her American Airlines flight as a reward for her heroism.

Jefferies said he hadn’t observed any symptoms before his heart attack—which is actually common. Symptoms are few and often general—like shortness of breath or soreness in the neck and jaw—the kind of thing one is far more likely to chalk up to a poor night of sleep.