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Becky Cole was eight months pregnant with her fourth child when she collapsed against the bathroom door. It was January 2011 in the Seattle suburb of Woodinville.
"I got up to go brush my teeth, and that's the last thing I remember," she says.
Her husband, Jon, heard the loud crash and called 911.
"She's fallen down, and she doesn't look like she's breathing. I need an emergency ambulance right now," he told the dispatcher.What happened next is typical in many cities across the country, but it's not nearly as universal as you might expect. When Jon Cole explained that his wife was unconscious and appeared to not be breathing, the dispatcher instructed him on how to perform CPR. He switched to speakerphone and the dispatcher led him through the process, step by step.
"I was so worried about doing it wrong that I clung to every word that dispatcher said. Because this is my wife, this is my best friend," he says.
Soon, the medics arrived and took over, but Jon Cole had kept her blood flowing with CPR for six minutes.