When Cindy Zimmerman, DNP, RN spotted the two vehicles on the side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, she knew she had to stop.
“I see cars pulled over on the Turnpike all the time, so that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary,” says Zimmerman, who works as a Clinical Nurse Manager in Temple Health-Chestnut Hill Hospital’s Emergency Department.
“But when I looked over, I saw a man sitting in a car with his back against the steering wheel, and a woman slumped over him,” she continues. “As an ED nurse, I assess patients the moment they walk through the door, often from far away. And when I saw that, I thought, ‘That just doesn’t look right.’”
Zimmerman, who has over 35 years of nursing experience, was on her way home from a shift in the ED that day in December. “When I pulled over, I was thinking, ‘If I’m wrong, the worst thing they can tell me is to get back in my car and go home,’” she recalls. “But when I got out of my car, I met John [Gallagher] and Doug [Sarver], who turned out to be Turnpike employees who’d stopped because they’d seen a driver in distress.”
“We were in a construction zone with a very short shoulder, and John and Doug told me that the driver had kept stopping and trying to open her door and get out,” Zimmerman says. “She was so lucky that they pulled over, because if she had gotten out of the car, someone probably would have hit her. John told me she seemed confused and that she was making noises. He was holding her head up so he could keep her airway open—that’s what I’d seen when I drove by—but he said she wasn’t breathing right.”
From the ED to the Roadside
That’s when Zimmerman’s nursing experience became essential. “To the average person, it would have looked like she was breathing—which is why Doug and John hadn’t started CPR—but she wasn’t,” Zimmerman explains. “She was doing something called agonal breathing, which is when you’re trying to breathe, but you aren’t getting any air through.”
“I told John to hop out of the car and asked him to lower her seat,” she continues. “If someone is sitting up, they may have low blood pressure, and you might not feel a pulse. But if you lay them down, you’ll sometimes feel a pulse. When she was lying back, I still couldn’t feel a pulse—and that’s when I started compressions.”
“In the ED, we do this kind of thing all the time,” she explains. “People come in and we do CPR: it’s like a muscle. I exercise that muscle all the time, and I’m not afraid to jump into high-stakes situations. I think that’s just how critical care professionals are.”
But Zimmerman also knew that the driver needed to be taken to a hospital. “I asked John and Doug if they had called an ambulance, and they said yes,” she says. “It got there about five minutes later, and they put the driver on an automated external defibrillator (AED). She woke up and was more aware, and the ambulance crew called the paramedics. She had a seizure after the paramedics and the police arrived, but she was able to be safely transported to a local hospital.”
“My Job Doesn’t End at These Four Walls”
Over the next few days, Zimmerman couldn’t stop thinking about the driver. “On my way to work in the morning, I cried when I passed the spot where we’d stopped,” she remembers. “If John and Doug hadn’t pulled over, the outcome would’ve been completely different. I wanted to reach out, so I wrote a letter to the Turnpike Commission, who connected me with them.”
“The Turnpike Commission also put me in touch with their Media Relations staffer, who said that the driver had called the police officer who had been at the scene,” Zimmerman says. “The driver had been discharged after a week in the hospital, and she wanted us to know that she was okay and to thank all of us who were there.”
Zimmerman was relieved to know the driver had recovered, but she insists that helping others in need is just what it means to be an RN. “As a nurse, my job doesn’t end at these four walls,” she explains. “Being a nurse is who I am—my grandmother was a nurse, and my son is one too—and if I can help and it’s safe for me to do so, I will.”
“When I was talking to Doug and John, they called me the driver’s guardian angel,” Zimmerman continues. “They said, ‘We prayed for somebody else to stop, and everybody kept driving by us.’ But I told them, ‘No, you’re her guardian angels. You were the ones who stopped in the first place. You stopped her from getting hit by a car. If I hadn’t seen you and your truck, I never would’ve pulled over in the first place. It was all of us, working together.’”
That, more than anything, is the message that Zimmerman—who has since become close friends with Gallagher and Sarver—wants readers to take away. “I just want people to be good humans and stop and help,” she says. “Those guys were angels and stopped. And I stopped. Things would have been so different if we hadn’t.”
Zimmerman’s story has made headlines: read and watch coverage from 6ABC Action News.