By Sean Hilliard
The Evening Sun (Hanover, Pennsylvania)
Copyright 2006 MediaNews Group, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
James Arter Jr. was only a week into his emergency medical technician training at Aspers Fire Co. when he went out on his first ambulance call.
Arter never suspected it would also be the first time he saved someone’s life.
He shared the story of that momentous call from Aspers Fire Hall on Tuesday afternoon, at an awards ceremony where the fire company received a plaque for its life-saving effort.
Arter said he was working at a bingo game at the fire hall when the call came in on the night of Sept. 22.
“It came over that there was an unconscious male at a restaurant,” Arter said.
But Leroy Weidner, an 82-year-old Gardners man, wasn’t just unconscious. He had no pulse and wasn’t breathing after going into cardiac arrest at Little Italy Family Restaurant.
The window for resuscitating the former Huntington Township supervisor was closing fast.
Arter and his partner, EMT Vicki Wagaman, started cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, with Arter pumping Weidner’s chest and Wagaman pumping oxygen into him.
When the effort failed to restart Weidner’s heart, acting Aspers Fire Chief Donald Haines attached the sensor stickers of a defibrillator to Weidner’s chest, and hit the button that would deliver the shock to him. As the electricity coursed into Weidner’s body, the EMTs hoped for the best.
Nothing.
Arter and Wagaman continued administering CPR to him, and Haines prepared the defibrillator for another shock.
Then it happened.
“We got a pulse,” Arter said.
Weidner was loaded onto a stretcher and into the back of Aspers’ ambulance.
Weidner was in Gettysburg Hospital for about three weeks, five days of which he spent in the intensive-care unit, but he ended up walking out of the hospital with a clean bill of health after several weeks of rehabilitation.
Weidner said on Tuesday night that he didn’t remember much from that night in September.
“I guess they did a good job, or I wouldn’t be here now,” he said.
State Rep. Steven Nickol and Steve Lyle, an official with the Emergency Health Services Federation, attended the event and presented the plaques to the fire company and Medic 28.
“Although it was a bunch of individual actions that made this happen, it was the system that worked,” Lyle said during the ceremony. “Without the concerted effort of this group, that man wouldn’t be here.”
Even though Weidner couldn’t attend the ceremony because he was getting ready for a meeting in Huntington Township, Nickol said he knew he wished he could have been.
“Even though he’s 82, Leroy is very active,” Nickol said. “He was a township supervisor for a number of years, and I understand he is still on the planning commission. I appreciate his level of community service, as well as Aspers Fire Co.'s.”