Omaha Man Meets Methodist Hospital Coworker Who Saved His Life

It’s been over two months since Methodist Hospital employees Tyrone Carter and Richard Nevarez first met. When they met this time, Nevarez was thanking Carter for his life.

“How you doing? How are you?” The two exchanged welcomes before Carter broke the ice. “Good to see you with your eyes open. How you feeling?”

“Much better than I did that day,” Nevarez said.

That day was July 13, when Nevarez, a 58-year-old medical screener at the hospital, was grabbing a bite to eat shortly after midnight.

“It was a normal night shift,” he said. “I had just gone up to the cafeteria and had ordered some food and was standing there, and I think I was getting ready to go to the cashier. The next thing I knew I woke up in the ICU.”

Fortunately for Nevarez, a co-worker he had never met, 48-year-old plant operations mechanic Carter, went right to work on lifesaving measures.

“I just heard kind of a thud behind me, when I turned around Richard was on the ground,” Carter said. He described his first steps to stabilize Nevarez while he had what appeared to be a seizure. “Shortly after that the seizure activity stopped, that’s when I got him flipped over onto this back, made sure his air waves were clear, no pulse, no rising or falling of the chest so no breathing, double checked his airway and began CPR.”

Nevarez went into cardiac arrest, and the medical professionals who followed Carter’s initial efforts credit the man with saving a life. If that sounds like Carter knows what he was doing, he does. A decade earlier he enrolled in classes at Metro College to learn EMT skills, including CPR.

WOWT: Omaha Man Meets Methodist Hospital Coworker Who Saved His Life

Omaha World-Herald: Mechanic Who Performed CPR Meets Omaha Man He Saved