ROADSIDE RESCUE Members of the Allen Hospital ICU team, including Dr. Vishal Goyal (third from left), Dr. Karl Terwilliger (fourth from right) and Dr. Sharad Bajaj (far right).
Roadside Rescue Triggers Rare Code Chill and ‘Miracle’ Ending At UnityPoint Health, we want to be there for patients every step of the way. On one particular Friday night in January, that was never more true.
for air – he was unconscious but gasping. We were all banging on the windows for two minutes as more cars stopped, and someone took his boot off and was trying to break the window.
Valerie Jones, the supervisor of the supply chain department at the hospital in Marshalltown, and her husband, Kirk, saw a car ahead of them veer off the road.
“Out of nowhere, this wonderful man (identified later as Isaac Wildman) came by with a sledgehammer and just smacked it and broke it. My husband then climbed in from the passenger side, and I went to the other side and threw open the van door. He had all this equipment. I just threw the equipment and his seat back. He had no pulse.”
It marked the start to a remarkable story of UnityPoint Health patient care, collaboration that ended at Allen Hospital in Waterloo, a trauma intervention called “code chill” and an unbelievably happy ending. But the path from Marshalltown to Waterloo is anything but a straight line, and it all began in Marshalltown, with Valerie and her husband. “We were about 50 feet behind another car when we saw it gently slide into a snowbank,” said Valerie. “We got next to his car 10 seconds later, and I could see him slumped over. We couldn’t get in. It was locked, and I could see he was gasping 2 | unitypoint.org
Valerie, who has worked at the hospital in Marshalltown for 36 years, was a scrub tech 18 of them and began administering CPR, while another person at the accident, Angie Eastman, helped Kirk do chest compressions. “Honestly, I thought he died,” said Valerie. “I just put my mouth on him and gave him breaths. I didn’t care if I was going to get sick. It was like, ‘I have to give this man air, he’s gasping.’”
