V
ickie Fox Price has been an employee at Memphis Light, Gas and Water for 38 years, now in the system security and compliance department—but before that, she also began working in fitness.
She still teaches fitness classes today, and one Saturday morning, those two worlds collided.
Price was leading her all-in-one fitness class, in which students take part in kickboxing, aerobics, step aerobics, line dancing and other forms of cardiovascular exercise, when she noticed one woman—a new student—seemed off-balance. “It wasn’t because she was out of step with what we were doing,” said Price. “She was wavering more than what was normal, so I gravitated over to her.”
It only took a few seconds for Price to get over to her and ask, “Are you OK?”
“She didn’t say anything, and the next thing I knew, she just fell out,” said Price.
All MLGW employees must be CPR-certified, and Price didn’t hesitate. She put her ear to the woman’s mouth, and when Price couldn’t hear or feel any breathing, she rushed to her bag to grab her CPR mouth guard, then immediately began a rapid rhythm of breaths and compressions.
It took approximately seven minutes for paramedics to arrive, and Price performed CPR the entire time, aiming for 100 compressions a minute. Once the woman was safely on a stretcher and under the care of the EMTs, one technician returned briefly to tell Price: “If you had not continued to administer CPR, this patient would have died.”
“I felt really good about it,” said Price. “I was proud that I was trained and proud that I knew what to do and how to do it.”
That Saturday marked Price’s fourth time using CPR to successfully save a life. She always remembers the words her first trainer told her: “When you administer CPR, think of the person as being asleep and you’re trying to wake them.” “If you think, ‘This person is dying,’ you have a tendency to freak out or become very nervous,” said Price. “That has always really helped me.”
She also credits MLGW’s continual focus on safety: “MLGW is a huge advocate of safety,” she said. “Safety is at the very top of MLGW’s priorities … anything from reading gas meters to how do you prevent yourself from being stung by wasps, from the smallest [concern] to the largest.”