COUNCIL BLUFFS — They laugh and joke a lot. After all, they have been friends for 15 years, ever since they became teachers at Thomas Jefferson High School.
“Remember when I saved your life?” Nicole Vetter asks.
Prompting Lori Williams to respond, “You won't let me forget.”
They laugh again. But make no mistake. They don't take lightly the events of five weeks ago, when science teacher Williams nearly died and physical education teacher Vetter brought her back.
The two women had accompanied the boys and girls basketball teams to Sioux City, Iowa, for games against Sioux City West. They had just been dropped off for the game. It was Feb. 11 at 3:15 p.m.
Williams remembers that much. It is up to Vetter to finish the story. “I was in the hallway, and they said she collapsed.”
They know now it was a heart attack, but Vetter didn't know what had happened at the time. All she knew was that the students were in an uproar, and 48-year-old Williams was on the floor.
“I was yelling at her, ‘Get up.' She wasn't getting up. She tried to speak. Then she was gone,” Vetter said.
Williams' heart had stopped. She wasn't breathing.
Vetter, 38, knows cardiopulmonary resuscitation and had just become a certified CPR trainer. “I had just finished teaching it to kids,” Vetter recalled.
Vetter went to work, alternating chest compressions and “rescue breaths,” the way she taught her students.
Williams “turned blue. Adrenalin kept me going,” Vetter said.
Three rounds of chest compressions and breaths got Williams' heart beating again.
Williams next was aware that she was in the emergency room at Mercy Hospital in Sioux City.
“I told the nurse, ‘My sternum is killing me,' ” Williams said, but today she concedes she is amazed that Vetter didn't even crack a rib while working to revive her.
Williams said no one at the hospital believed she had a heart attack. Not at first. They started running tests. At one point during her four-day hospital stay she texted friends: “You will be happy and proud to know that I tested clean for drugs, alcohol, and I am not pregnant.”
Then one of the tests confirmed that she had, indeed, suffered a heart attack.
“I asked the cardiologist if I would have died without the CPR, and she said, ‘Yes.' So please learn CPR,” Williams said.
Vetter obviously knew the importance of CPR training, but she said a lot of Thomas Jefferson High School students are aware now, too.
“My CPR classes are completely different. They used to ask, ‘Would you ever use this?' ” Vetter said.
Both teachers also have become advocates of automatic external defibrillators — devices used to jump-start a stopped heart — in public facilities. In Council Bluffs, Thomas Jefferson High School has one, as do Abraham Lincoln High School, the middle schools and two elementary schools. Vetter and Williams would like to see more of the devices at each facility, noting that minutes count when a heart stops.
After her heart attack, Williams wore a personal defibrillator until March 8. That also was the day she learned of a possible reason for the heart attack.
“One doctor said I was an enigma. Another said I was unique. But my new cardiologist thinks it was a blood clot,” Williams said. She said the doctor explained that a moving blood clot might have lodged in her heart — a clot that Vetter might have knocked free during CPR.
“There's no way you can thank someone enough for saving your life,” Williams said, prompting Vetter to add: “But I'll make her try.”
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