No appointment necessary

Marisa O’Neil

Newport Beach Fire Station No. 1 doesn’t get a lot of foot traffic --

especially not at the back door.

But when Costa Mesa resident Dave Neumann pounded on the roll-up

door behind the station, neither he nor the firefighters inside knew

his life depended on them hearing him.

Neumann, a 54-year-old telephone technician, was working on the

Balboa Peninsula the morning of Feb. 26, a Saturday. He started

feeling a little weak and dizzy after doing a couple jobs and went

alone to his local field office to lie down and rest.

It didn’t help.

“That tiredness didn’t go away,” he recalled. “I felt a little

more dizzy, little more nauseous. I kind of got chilled, then a cold

feeling in my shoulder blades. It was a real uncomfortable, abnormal

feeling.

“That’s when I thought something might be going on here. That’s

when a little voice said, ‘Go to the fire station.’”

He realized that if something happened to him in the empty office,

no one would find him until Monday. And he decided that, rather than

call 911, he’d drive the few blocks to the Newport Beach Fire station

on Balboa Boulevard.

The thought crossed his mind that he might be having a heart

attack. But with a slim build, a healthy diet and no family history

of heart trouble, he dismissed the possibility.

“I thought about it,” he said. “I thought, ‘This can’t be

happening to me. I can’t be having a heart attack.’ I thought I’d

just spend a few minutes and have a chat with the boys over there.

But if something was wrong, that was where I needed to be.”

Instead of going to the front, which has a doorbell and callbox,

he pulled in the back of the fire station. He started pounding on the

roll-up door.

“I heard this banging on the back door and went downstairs,”

Newport Beach Fire Capt. Dave Bowman remembered. “There’s this

gentleman sitting there. He said he didn’t feel well. He didn’t look

well. He looked gray.”

Bowman sat him down on a workout bench inside the station.

Firefighters started checking his vital signs and asking about his

medical history.

It wasn’t yet clear what was wrong, but Bowman, a former

paramedic, decided to call paramedics from a nearby station. Neumann

complained that he was feeling worse and fire engineer Tim Guckes

told him to lie down on a gym mat.

“I don’t remember making it to the mat,” Neumann said.

When Bowman came back from his office, Neumann was having a heart

attack.

“His knees were bent up toward his waist, his arms went up toward

his chest....” Bowman said. “I’ve seen it before when people go into

cardiac arrest.”

The firefighters grabbed a portable defibrillator and gave him a

shock. Just then an ambulance, with an emergency-room nurse on a

ride-along, pulled up.

Paramedics got Neumann to Hoag Hospital, where he had surgery to

place a stent in his heart. Two main arteries were 100% blocked;

others were 70% blocked, Neumann said.

A few days later, he had quadruple bypass surgery.

“It was a big surprise,” Neumann said. “I thought I was in decent

shape. I don’t smoke, no high blood pressure, no history of heart

problems in my family. It was real sudden. A real surprise.”

Now Neumann is being even more careful about what he eats and is

slowly recovering from his close call -- one that could have ended

very differently if his timing had been off. The firefighters

affectionately scolded him for driving himself to the station instead

of calling 911, Bowman said.

“If we’d been on a call, he’d probably have died,” Bowman said.

“It was just one of those calls -- he happened to be there, we were

here, fortunately we had our equipment, and we have very good

training.”

Neumann’s wife, Teri Neumann, put it differently.

“Firemen are incredible,” she said. “They’re God’s angels taking

care of the community.”