Student-Hero Saves Man 20 Minutes by Waking Him Up for Bus
Earlier this week, medical student Brodie Dangle woke a man sleeping at a bus stop just in time for the arrival of the man’s bus.
Brodie recalls that the afternoon of the incident was like any other: “I was walking back home after crushing it in the library for five or six hours when I saw this guy who was just lights out at the bus stop. I’d just gone over some cardio stuff so immediately I think, you know, boom: cardiac arrest.”
That’s when Dangle sprung into action.
“I sprint over to the scene with my backpack—which is like 40 pounds, by the way—still strapped to me,” Dangle said. “On the way I’m looking at everyone else at the bus stop and doing a threat assessment. Good news: no danger. They’re all just standing around and ignoring this dude.”
Witnesses reported Dangle arriving at the scene looking winded and shouting, to no one in particular, “SCENE IS SAFE.” Dangle then allegedly leapt onto the man and began administering CPR.
“So I’m like 5 reps in on the chest compressions going strong to the tune of ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ when I feel a rib or two give way, which they tell you can happen. Still a total adrenaline rush.”
Then, a moment of triumph:
“Dude woke up at like rep 10. Complete shocker for me. I’m thinking, okay, one: I just saved this dude’s life and two: I gotta stop doing CPR. So I try to stop, but like I said I’ve got the adrenaline going and so I blast through another five, maybe ten reps of compressions.
“It’s kind of like how it takes freight trains like a mile to stop,” he said, pantomiming a train conductor blowing a whistle. “You know what I mean.”
The man was able to stand following the incident, but was not as grateful as Dangle had anticipated.
“He got up and started shouting at me all sorts of stuff you probably can’t print. Apparently he was just sleeping. Oops. Good news was he was still able to limp onto the bus afterward. The next one wasn’t for like 20 minutes so if he’d stayed asleep he might have been late to, you know, wherever he was going.
“I guess in hindsight I should have checked for a pulse. Or noticed that he was still breathing,” Dangle said. But that’s not the only thing that he learned from the incident.
“I was under the impression that you couldn’t sue medical students for this stuff. Apparently that might not apply in this case though so I’m hoping to figure that out soon.”
Connor Lynch is a second year medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
