Paul Kelly wants everyone in Indian River County to know about the day he died – and lived to tell about it.
Not for himself, though.
“I want people to know how this woman saved my life,” the 73-year-old retired physical education teacher, college tennis coach and tennis-court builder told me last weekend, when I visited his South County home. “If it hadn’t been for her, we wouldn’t be talking right now.
“She’s an angel.”
Actually, Tammy Hallam is a dental hygienist, her profession for the past 35 years.
She moved here from Bonita Springs two years ago and works on the island at Vero Implant and Esthetic Dentistry, where her job requires that she remain certified in CPR. She’s also a recreational tennis player who happened to be nearby when Kelly collapsed on a court last summer.
And thanks to Kelly, who made repeated phone calls to the Fire Rescue squad to lobby for public recognition of her heroism, Hallam will be honored at next week’s County Commission meeting for using her CPR training to bring him back from the dead.
“Bless his heart,” Hallam said, “but I’m really not the type of person who looks for that kind of attention.”
Bless her heart for being the type of person she is.
Kelly wasn’t exaggerating: If Hallam hadn’t been playing doubles with friends at the Vero Beach Tennis Club at Timber Ridge on that fateful Friday morning – if she hadn’t been both decisive and prepared – he almost certainly would’ve died on the court.
“I was gone,” Kelly said. “I even had an out-of-body experience where I was standing there, a few feet away, and saw a man lying on his back and a woman doing CPR on him. When I looked closer, the man was me.”
In fact, Kelly said he doesn’t recall regaining consciousness until Saturday evening, roughly 36 hours later, at Indian River Medical Center.
“My wife, Linda, said I responded earlier,” Kelly said, “but I have no memory of it.”
He does remember – in vivid detail – what happened before he collapsed, however.
Kelly said he accepted an invitation to play tennis that late-June morning, despite the summer heat and humidity, because he was “battling pneumonia” and wanted to “sweat it out.” He recalls playing doubles, losing the first set 6-4 and “playing pretty well.”
The group had begun the second set and he was positioned at the net, having just hit a volley, when he felt himself falling forward. Suddenly, he blacked out.
The other players on the court rushed to him, but, other than yelling for help, none knew what to do. One of the club’s owners, Marco Osorio, heard the call, ran into the clubhouse and grabbed the defibrillator, but he lacked medical training and was not well-versed in how to use the device.
It was then that Hallam, whose foursome was on a changeover a couple of courts away, noticed the commotion.
“I saw a man on the ground and the guys standing around him and, at first, I thought he just fell,” Hallam said. “Then I saw Marco run out with the defibrillator. So I ran over.”
She immediately turned Kelly onto his back and checked his pulse.
“His eyes were rolled back, he had no pulse, he was turning blue . . . He was completely unresponsive,” Hallam said. “No one else had a clue what to do, so I knew it was up to me and just took over.”
So did her adrenaline – and her training.
Hallam quickly cut off Kelly’s shirt, used a towel to dry the perspiration on his torso and carefully attached the defibrillator pads. She shocked him twice, but still there was no heartbeat. She’s not sure if she gave him a third jolt before switching to CPR.
“The defibrillator reads everything, then tells you what to do,” Hallam said. “After a couple of shocks, it said to perform CPR, which is what I did.”
It was, she said, the first time she had put her training to use.
“As a hygienist, the state requires us to renew our CPR certification every two years, so I had taken the course a lot over the past 35 years,” Hallam said, adding that she had taken a refresher class only a few months earlier.
“But it wasn’t until that day with Paul that I had to use it.”
Part of her CPR training was knowing to not panic if she heard cracking sounds – which she did – and continue the chest massage, because it’s more important to restart the heart than worry about any damage done to cartilage or the rib cage.
Within minutes, Kelly began coughing, then breathing, and his heart began beating again. He had come back to life. A few minutes later, a Fire Rescue team arrived and took him to the hospital.
And what did Hallam do?
“I didn’t really think about what was happening while I was doing it; I just reacted,” she said. “So once I revived him and the paramedics took him away in the ambulance, I walked over to the bench and sat down. After that kind of adrenaline rush, I was shaking so much . . . I couldn’t absorb it all.
“I just remember people kept coming up to me and saying, ‘Do you know what you just did?’ “
Apparently, she didn’t: After the ambulance drove off, Hallam and her friends returned to the court and finished their match.
Meanwhile, Kelly survived his heart attack, but his troubles were far from over. Doctors were forced to wait nearly a week before implanting a defibrillator in his chest because of his bout with pneumonia.
Then, while he was recovering from the implant procedure, Kelly experienced a painful and frightening bronchial spasm, during which he felt as if he couldn’t breathe.
“You’re in extreme pain and you can’t breathe, so you panic,” he said. “Fortunately, it passes.”
The next day, more than a week after he collapsed on the court, Kelly finally went home – but not for long.
Two weeks later, he was back in the hospital for surgery to clear a blockage in a carotid artery. Three weeks after that, he underwent quadruple bypass surgery.
“So I’m completely rebuilt,” Kelly joked.
Truth is, Kelly, who moved to Vero Beach in 1998, is now healthier than many men his age. He has been active and athletic throughout his life, and he enjoys physical exertion, whether it’s recreational or being handy around the house.
He walks two miles every day, rows along the lagoon with his wife in their two-seat kayak and proudly shows off the two patios, chair swing, gazebo and swinging-bridge he has built in his backyard.
“I’ve been physical my whole life,” said Kelly, a Minnesota native who coached the Iowa State tennis team for two seasons in the late 1970s and owned and operated a tennis-court construction company for 25 years before retiring in 2011. “I still enjoy it.”
He hopes to enjoy tennis again, too – and soon.
“I haven’t swung a racket since my heart attack, but I’ll play again,” Kelly said. “I’m physically able and ready to go. I might wait for this heat to subside a bit, but I want to get back out on the court.”
First, though, there’s Tuesday morning’s County Commission meeting.
“After I got out of the hospital the first time, I went to the tennis club to see Tammy and thank her for what she did,” Kelly said. “We didn’t know each other before this happened, but I hugged her, she hugged me and there were some tears.
“I told her I wanted to take her and her husband to dinner, and eventually we did get together at the Riverside Cafe,” he added. “But I wanted to do more. I thought she deserved some type of public recognition.”
So Kelly called the Fire Rescue squad and described how a dental hygienist brought him back from the dead. It took several calls before he finally got to Assistant Fire Chief Brian Burkeen, who agreed to recommend Hallam for a Life Saving Award from the county’s Emergency Services Department.
“Did you know she helped someone else not long after she saved me?” Kelly said.
Three weeks after pulling Kelly from the clutches of the Grim Reaper, Hallam arrived home to find a landscaper in distress across the street. This time, it was heat stroke, not a heart attack.
Again, Hallam sprang into action: She ran into the house and came out with ice packs, Gatorade and a dry shirt, and quickly revived him.
“Anybody can do it,” she said, “if they have the training and know what to do.”
Maybe so, but Kelly believes he was saved by something more than CPR, that he was touched by an angel who refused to let him go. And he ought to know.
He died – and lived to tell about it.