TAYLORSVILLE — When Michelle Patey discovered her husband was turning blue on the bedroom floor one night and called 911, emergency responders wouldn't arrive for another nine minutes.
Once a person stops breathing, it can take as little as six minutes for brain damage to occur and 10 minutes without oxygen for a person to die, according to the National CPR Foundation.
The math was not in their favor.
Yet on Monday, Robert Patey, of Murray, stood smiling at a Unified Fire Authority station — fully recovered from his medical scare six months earlier — to see his wife receive the Unified Lifesaving Award for rescuing him that night thanks to her CPR training.
"If it weren't for the firemen and me knowing CPR, he wouldn't be here," Michelle Patey said tearfully.
Patey said his wife is his hero, though she said she never thought she was doing anything heroic when she made the simple decision to take advantage of the CPR training offered by her employer, Layton Construction.
"I'm grateful that I learned it and knew what to do," Michelle Patey said. "I think a lot of people may hesitate, but when you're put in that circumstance and that instance, it just kicks in and you do what you have to do."
Patey said his wife gave him a second chance at life.
"CPR matters," he said. "I'm standing here because of that."
He added that he hopes more employers will offer CPR training to their employees.
Michelle Patey recalled waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of her husband snoring — something he doesn't typically do. She tried to wake him, but he didn't respond. Shaking him and yelling, she still couldn't get him to wake up.
"His eyes rolled to the back of his head," she said.
She realized he wasn't breathing and called 911. The dispatcher told her to roll him off the bed, which she did, and then began administering CPR.
"The most critical point in a cardiac arrest is early recognition of cardiac arrest and early administration of CPR," said Chris Middlemiss, a Unified fire medical training specialist. "The reason we like to present the lifesaving award is because we like to bring awareness to the importance of bystander CPR. People in the community — that's really what is saving lives — is people out there who learn CPR and know how to administer CPR."
Middlemiss suggests pushtosurvive.org, a free site that teaches CPR in 10 minutes, to anyone wanting to learn the lifesaving skill.
Michelle Patey performed nine straight minutes of CPR on her husband before the emergency responders arrived, and she said those minutes "felt like an eternity." She broke one of his ribs in the process.
"We see many lives saved by bystanders performing CPR prior to rescue workers showing up," Middlemiss said.
The Patey family and the Unified fire crew agree — everyone should learn CPR, because you can never predict when a loved one might stop breathing.