On her way to a work conference, Sherman Hospital nurse saves driver whose heart stopped after crash

By all accounts, Ashley Huizar and the four other Advocate Sherman Hospital nurses shouldn’t even have been on the route they were taking to a work conference in Iowa last month.

“We took two cars and the driver of the first car plugged in the address of the conference and, instead of the highway, it had us taking a different way on Route 64,” Huizar recalled. “We just decided to follow that route instead.”

The decision would prove life-altering for more than just the nurses.

Barely 20 miles into their journey from the Elgin hospital where they work, they came upon a two-vehicle crash at Route 64 and First Street just west of Sycamore in rural DeKalb County.

The nurses were in a two-car caravan and Huizar was in the trailing car. They drove through the intersection and they could see one car off in a ditch and another in the middle of the intersection with significant front-end damage and airbag deployment.

The nurse driving the first car pulled off to the shoulder and the nurse driving Huizar and another nurse followed suit.

“We got out to assess the situation and all the sudden this bystander comes running up yelling, ‘This lady over here looks like she’s having a heart attack,’” said Huizar, of Huntley, in a recent Emergency Nurses Association podcast episode.

Huizar, an eight-year emergency room nursing veteran, four of which have been at Sherman, said the adrenaline kicked in. She could see the female driver in the car in the middle of the intersection was having trouble breathing, but the doors were locked and she didn’t have anything strong enough to break a window.

“That was the hardest part to me was not being able to get to that lady,” she said in the podcast.

Another passerby soon arrived with a hammer and shattered a window so they could unlock the door and extricate the driver.

“We had to stabilize her neck and we carefully got her out of the car,” Huizar said by phone recently. “I placed a jacket behind her head and felt for a pulse.”

Huizar couldn’t find a pulse, so she immediately began CPR.

“I started panicking a little bit more because I’m not in the hospital and don’t have all the resources I need to help someone,” she said.

But soon, the woman’s pulse was back and by the time paramedics from the Sycamore Fire Department arrived, the woman was conscious and breathing.

“I do think about her often and wonder if she’s OK,” Huizar said.

The woman was transported to Northwestern Medicine Kishwaukee Hospital in DeKalb, but because of privacy regulations, hospital officials and Sycamore fire officials couldn’t say how she fared.

Sycamore fire officials said the driver and a passenger in the other vehicle were treated at the scene and released.

“The lady was very lucky to be alive considering she did not have her seat belt on and there was (cracking) on the windshield,” Huizar said in the podcast episode.

The windshield damage was indicative that some part of the woman’s body, possibly her head, struck it, Huizar said.

Huizar briefed the paramedics on what she knew about the woman’s condition as they loaded the woman into an ambulance. Then, she and the other nurses “got up, dusted our hands off, got back in the car and drove on to Iowa.”

For the next two-plus hours on the road, the nurses decompressed and talked about what they had just gone through. Huizar was planning to use some of the road time to practice for the presentation she was giving at the conference the next day.

In the morning, Huizar was telling her colleagues how nervous she was about giving the presentation.

“They were like, ‘Ashley, you just saved someone’s life. You’re a hero. You can do this,’” she said.

Huizar said the presentation went well after all and there were no hiccups. She almost talked too long, she admitted.

And more important, there were no unexpected emergency stops on their ride home.