While on the Job, a Quick-Thinking Tech Saves Customer

A young HVAC technician on a routine service call last month helped save the life of a customer who was suffering a heart attack.

Cameron Lowe, who works out of the Chattanooga, Tennessee, location of North Georgia Heating & Air, performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on the customer, David Killian, for about 11 minutes on September 5 before an ambulance arrived.

“I was just gone. My heart had stopped,” Killian recalled recently.

Killian, who had been cutting a neighbor’s lawn and then his own before he was stricken, regained consciousness in the ambulance while en route to a hospital, he said. An emergency medical technician quizzed him about his name, address, his wife’s name, and other basic information.

The EMT then said, “I want you to understand something, how blessed you are.” Most heart attack victims who’ve lost consciousness for that long, the technician told him, don’t snap back so quickly.

Killian estimates he was unconscious for about 20 minutes.

“For me to last that long, he (Lowe) must’ve gotten a heartbeat back,” he said.

Lowe, who could not be reached for this story, didn’t know CPR when he stopped at Killian’s house in Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, north of Chattanooga. But the 911 emergency dispatcher talked him through it, Killian said.

Killian said he went directly from the hospital’s emergency room to the heart catheterization lab, and was up and around in short order. He went home three days later.

That same day, Killian and his wife, Marilyn, had Lowe over for supper. They invited him to accompany them to their church, Red Bank Baptist in Chattanooga, the following Sunday, and he accepted. Killian is a deacon at the church.

Lowe, according to a report in Kentucky Today, was moved by Red Bank pastor Sam Greer’s sermon, and the two spoke after the service. Both men, it turned out, had lost their fathers when they were 10 years old.

Lowe, according to Kentucky Today, asked Greer where he had found peace after such a loss, and Greer replied that he had found it in the Gospel and had been saved at age 21. “I’m 21,” Lowe responded.

“It’s almost like God stopped my heart to open up yours,” Killian told his hero.

Killian said that had he been able to quickly locate a capacitor for his a/c unit the previous month, Lowe might not have been at his home to rescue him. “God was just all over this,” he said.

The a/c had failed in August, and Lowe, a retired electrician, diagnosed the problem as a bad capacitor. He couldn’t find a suitable replacement online, he said, and, not wanting to sweat it out, contacted North Georgia Heating & Air to have the system fixed.

He also signed up for North Georgia’s preventive maintenance program, and it was for a system checkup that Lowe was at his home the next month.

“I think they’re my guys from now on,” Killian said with a chuckle.