Tom Bartiss worked as firefighter in West Haven for nearly 30 years. He was on vacation in Mexico in March when an emergency struck.
“You’re never on vacation when you’re firefighting,” Bartiss said. “You’re always ready to respond to any call that you need to.”
He was grabbing dinner with his wife when she noticed a commotion.
“The restaurants are surrounded by pools,” said Bartiss. “We see people carrying a woman out and my wife noticed two bare little feet sticking out and a crowd around.”
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Bartiss says he rushed to the scene. When he got there, he noticed a woman, who he would later find out is a nurse, doing CPR on a 13-year-old child. Together they worked for 20 minutes to revive the child.
“Totally exhausted, totally exhausted,” Bartiss said when asked how he felt afterwards. “You put everything into it that you have.”
He says the child began to moan and was taken to ambulance where he received care.
Bartiss, who has been a volunteer fire fighter at the Orange Fire Department for eight years, says saving the boy felt good.
“The feeling is, is wonderful,” he said. “When you’re doing CPR, you understand that 90 percent of people are not going to make it. This being a child, you do everything that you can possibly do. It worked out well.”
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The child and his mother received medical assistance and returned to the resort three days later.
“We were never able to meet up with the family or the child, which I would have loved to do, just see him in person,” he says. “I did see him, but not able to talk to him.”
While there was no reunion, Bartiss says the message he wants people to take away from this is that they should learn how to do CPR and use an AED.
