By Vince Gasparini
syracuse.com
Syracuse, N.Y. — Police Officer John Canestrare was giving chest compressions to a woman he found Friday morning lying on the ground outside a house that was on fire.
The woman had burns, Canestrare told syracuse.com | The Post-Standard. He said one of her feet was severely broken, so it was almost detached from her leg.
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“It looked like she had jumped,” Canestrare said.
Around 9:15 a.m., Rick Macheda saw smoke as he drove near 105 Fourth North St. in Syracuse.
Macheda, a firefighter and EMT in Cazenovia with 40 years of experience, pulled over. Flames were shooting up from the house.
The two men barely exchanged any words before Macheda grabbed his medical bag from his truck and began to help Canestrare. They quickly became a lifesaving team for the woman, who was non-responsive.
“I checked for a pulse,” Macheda said. “There wasn’t any.”
The two were giving her CPR as the first firefighters arrived. Macheda asked them for a defibrillator. When he applied the electrode pads to the woman, he could not detect a heart rhythm, he said.
Canestrare continued to do compressions while Macheda secured an airway for the woman using medical equipment from his bag.
At one point, Canestrare got tired, so the two switched and Macheda began doing the compressions.
They kept going for about 10 minutes until EMTs arrived, Macheda said. They got her into an ambulance.
Canestrare, who has been on the Syracuse police force about four years, feared the worst. “Initially, I was like, ‘this is going to be a fatal fire,’” he said.
But soon after leaving, firefighters told them the EMTs found she had a pulse.
“So once we heard that she had a pulse, we were pretty grateful,” the officer said.
The two strangers, who had worked so hard to revive her, hugged.
“We shook hands and embraced each other several times saying, ‘holy cow, what just happened,’” Macheda said.
As of Monday afternoon, the woman was in critical condition at Upstate University Hospital, according to the Syracuse Fire Department. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
On Sunday, Macheda said he’d heard from her daughter, who was driving up to Syracuse from Florida.
“That’s what I’ve been trained to do,” Macheda told syracuse.com. “For me, it’s just second nature to just dive in and start saving somebody, because that’s what we do.”
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