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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Spokane nurse saves woman from drowning in Maui

By Caroline Hammett The Spokesman-Review

,Jodi Chamberlain stood by the beach in Napili Point, Maui, while talking on the phone with her daughter. It was 11:02 in the morning on Wednesday, May 24.

Then she heard two women yelling, “Lady with the phone! Lady with the phone!”

Chamberlain turned and saw two maids yelling down at her from the second floor and assumed they were pointing at turtles in the bay. She motioned in acknowledgment and turned back around.

But she heard them again and this time they were saying, “Lady with the phone – Pool! Pool!”

She looked and saw a woman “laying flat at the bottom” of the pool.

“Gotta go!” she told her daughter on the phone as she dropped her things and ran to the pool.

Chamberlain cried for help as she dived into the pool.

“I thought I could pick her up,” she said, “but she was dead weight.”

The third time she came up for air, she saw three men. Josh Woolery, Kinchi Kong, and Dylan Morris all dove into the pool and together they got the woman out.

The woman was “a horrible, pasty gray” and had no heart rate, said Chamberlain.

She said, “Somebody yelled, ‘Does anyone know CPR?’ and I was like, ‘I do. I’m a nurse.’ ”

Chamberlain, a registered nurse for 38 years, started calling orders and began administering hands-only CPR.

She told the men to monitor the pulse in her wrist and on her neck.

After the woman received eight to 10 minutes of CPR, Josh called, “I’ve got a pulse.”

“She had bloody, frothy stuff coming out of her mouth and I was trying to keep her airway clear,” Chamberlain said. The woman was suffering from pulmonary edema, which is the body’s reaction when excessive liquid enters the lungs.

At 11:38 a.m., the ambulance arrived.

“They just scooped her up and ran,” said Chamberlain.

She was told that on the ambulance, the woman, Min Lee, “had a seizure and was posturing” from severe lack of oxygen to her brain.

Upon Lee’s arrival at the Maui Memorial Medical Center in Wailuku, her ICU doctor implemented the appropriate protocol.

He cooled Lee’s body temperature down for 24 hours and administered steroids to let her body relax and reduce brain swelling. The next day, he began warming up her body and checking for reflexes.

Chamberlain went to the hospital the following day in Wailuku to check on Lee, who was still in an induced coma the day after the incident.

She provided the doctors in Wailuku with a timeline of the incident based on her phone call and the recollections of witnesses describing Lee’s whereabouts.

“By my best estimates, she had to be down in the pool for 4 to 6 minutes, and it probably took us about 3 minutes for us to get her out,” Chamberlain said. Factoring in CPR, she said that Lee must have been without oxygen for 10 to 12 minutes – “far too long to live.”

“This is what happens when people do effective CPR,” the doctor told Chamberlain.

“It wasn’t just me,” she said, “I’ve been a nurse for 38 years, and whenever something good happens, it is a group effort.”

“Everybody sprang into action,” she said.

Lee developed acute respiratory distress syndrome and bruising on her ribs.

Lee was intubated, or “on the vent,” for six days. She was extubated on a Tuesday morning, discharged from the hospital on a Friday, and returned home to California the following Tuesday.

“She shouldn’t have lived,” said Chamberlain, who is a chemotherapy infusion nurse at Cancer Care Northwest.

“Maybe it’s a ray of hope that there are still good things that can happen out there,” she said. “Miracles can still happen.”

Lee’s near-drowning occurred during the second week of the Chamberlains’ vacation after their grandchildren left.

“My second week was supposed to be my relaxing week,” she said, “That didn’t go exactly as planned.”

Chamberlain scheduled a massage two hours after saving Min Lee.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on July 3, 2017 to add names of additional rescuers.

Her masseuse said, “You’re kind of tense up here.”

Chamberlain replied, “I have a little story to tell you.”