A Limerick woman has been praised for saving a man’s life whilst in New Zealand ahead of Ireland’s clash with the All Blacks in Eden Park on Saturday evening.
The Rugby Travel Ireland tour manager wants the incident to help raise awareness of the importance of learning CPR.
Sarah Hartigan was at a function ahead of the Ireland match in Eden Park, New Zealand, with a tour group when they heard a commotion out the back.
“We’re looking after a lot of people, so I went down just to see that, hopefully, none of our crew were involved. When I went down, I could see someone slumped down in the car,” she said.
People around her were panicking, calling for someone to ring an ambulance and the man’s daughter was very upset. Those at the scene were shocked at what had happened.
Sarah knew she had to react. She said: “I just jumped in and started doing compression. I tried to see if we could get him out of the car, but the way the car was set, we really couldn’t have managed that. I got the seat back as best we could and just gave compression.”
Speaking on Newstalk Breakfast, she said that the man, who was Waikato rugby stalwart Dean Herewini, regained consciousness after a “minute or two” of chest compression.
Given her history and experience in the field of sports, Sarah had training in first aid but admitted that you “don’t know” how you will react until you’re faced with a situation like this. “That was the first reaction. I need to do something. Nobody seemed to be doing anything with him.
“It was just one of those [things], whether it was going to work or not, somebody had to try,” she said.
Sarah admitted to host Shane Coleman that the last few days have been “overwhelming” as she is not someone to brag about what she did.
She said: “[I’m not] looking to get any credit from this. The most important thing is to bring awareness to how important this is. Even the basics can save a life. You don’t need to know a whole amount about CPR to help.
“I know the percentage of people surviving outside of a hospital is pretty low but this just proves that it can be done, that the basic compressions on a chest can bring somebody back to get them to the right place so they can be looked after.”
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