My friend and neighbor, John Haggerty, has saved a few lives in his various roles of hockey coach and supervisor and woodshop manager. Sometimes it is by good instruction in safe practices. Occasionally, it has been far more dramatic. Once, it made the Philadelphia papers. I didn’t know that at the time. John told me about the incident, but didn’t show me any clippings. One of the team members got his jugular sliced by a skate blade. John was right on it. He pinched the wound closed and kept pressure on it all the way to the operating room. What the newspaper article didn’t mention was that John had his skates on the whole time. So he was putting constant pressure on this boy’s neck while they were taking him out of the ambulance and wheeling him all the way into the OR, with his skates on.
If he had not thought so quickly, and been so steady on his skates, that boy would have lost his life by bleeding to death. Here is the article.