Not a Dead Man

Sunday we went to the zoo in Madison. It's a pretty small zoo, but a nice place to walk around. The spaces for the animals are pretty small and that's not so good but if you can get past that, it's a pleasant enough place.

Right in front of the Herpetarium we saw a man collapsing. He had two people (his brother and sister-in-law) holding him by the arms and taking him over to a bench. He had no strength in his legs at all. There were a lot of people around and so after offering our bottles of water (they were refused), we got out of the way. Someone else was already dialing 911, and soon after they laid him on the ground and started CPR. We moved farther away.

It seems like it took 10 minutes for the ambulance to arrive. A few minutes later he was on a gurney and in the back. But he didn't have an oxygen mask on and it was clear they hadn't done anything to him. His sister-in-law was walking around a little dazed and his brother was with the kids. Given the CPR and the time it took for the ambulance to get there and the lack of any work on him we were certain we had just watched a man die.

A while later I saw a zoo keeper and I asked him about the man. It turns out that the CPR worked and that he was doing fine and even joking about the fact that there wasn't a pillow on the stretcher. We didn't see him talking or laughing but we decided to trust the zoo keeper (because if you can't trust a zoo keeper, who can you trust?!) and believe that we did not witness a man die.