It’s been a couple years, so some details are fuzzy. What remains crystal clear is that the accident victim she helped by the side of the road wasn’t breathing when she started using the Ambu® Bag™ resuscitator. 

Within a minute, he coughed and sat up.

Back then, Charlene Polyock was an anesthesia sales rep for Ambu, driving home on Interstate 43 South in Wisconsin, somewhere between East Troy and Waukesha, when she saw two cars pulled over on the right shoulder. The front of one of the cars was badly smashed.

It was rush hour, so cars were moving slower than usual, between 20 and 40 miles per hour, she estimates. Charlene immediately veered off onto the shoulder and parked behind the damaged cars — instincts honed from years of nursing, along with a burst of adrenaline, kicking in.

'He Sat Up'

She grabbed an Ambu Bag and a rescue bag containing gloves from her trunk, pulling on the gloves as she sprinted ahead toward the cars.

She found two people leaning into the badly damaged car talking to the driver. He looked to be in his 20s, casually dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. He was breathing heavily and fast and complaining of severe abdominal pain.

She asked him his name. “Javon” he told her. Then he lost consciousness.

Charlene asked a man at the scene to help her pull Javon from the car in case she needed to do CPR.

“I remember thinking, OK, I’m a little rusty, but I’m going to go through my steps. Check for a pulse. He had one, so I knew I didn’t need compressions.”

“I didn’t hear him breathing. I started giving him respirations with the Ambu Bag. I gave him three to six breaths. After about 30 seconds, he started coughing, and he sat up.”

After Javon started breathing again, he tried to lay back down to go to sleep. Charlene knew she couldn’t let him. She prayed with Javon.

During the minutes they spent together, Javon’s cell phone rang. When Charlene answered, it was Javon’s  brother on the other end. She told him about the accident and that she and others were with Javon. She told him an ambulance was coming, and they prayed together.

Javon was conscious and awake when the ambulance arrived. Soon afterward, it whisked him away.

Soon afterward, it whisked him away.

Into Safe Hands

More than eight years as a nurse and her early work with Ambu as a clinical training specialist made much of what she did that afternoon nearly automatic.

“I was longing to know if he was OK,” she says. “Unfortunately, I had to transfer him into those other safe hands.”

She wonders about him still.

She isn’t sure how Javon spells his name, but she remembers it easily because she had just won an account for Ambu at nearby Javon Bea Hospital – Riverside in Rockford, Ill. The coincidence wasn’t lost on her in that moment or still today. Everything happens for a reason, she believes.
  
“I felt really grateful that I had the Ambu Bag in the car,” she says. “I think God had me equipped in that situation because he knew I’d be able to help. I was very happy that I was the one who was there.”

Now with a young daughter of her own, Charlene says she keeps an Ambu Bag of every size in her kitchen: a baby one, a pediatric one and an adult size. 

“It’s just a great emergency device,” she says. “Why not, if you’re trained in CPR?”