Park City and Intermountain Medical Center emergency department nurse ‘an angel twice’

Aly Speak, RN, had just stopped at a busy intersection in Park City when she saw the driver across from her slump over as the car continued to roll. Without hesitation, Aly, who works in the emergency departments at Park City Hospital in Park City, Utah, and Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah, raced to check the driver and stop the car.  

“I ran to her car and realized she had arrested,” Aly said. 

Before she knew it, Aly was performing CPR as a crowd formed. She asked one person to call 9-1-1 and assigned another to run to a nearby McDonald’s to see if they had an Automated External Defibrillator (AED). When the EMTs arrived, Aly, knowing the woman would need a high level of care, recommended they send her immediately to a Salt Lake City hospital. 

Just like that, a morning coffee run had become an adrenalized life-saving mission, without all of the usual supports of staff and technology that one would have in an emergency department. 

“It’s so different to rescue someone on the street because you don’t have IVs or techs to help,” Aly said. “You don’t have any of the things you usually do — you’re on your own with no supplies. I had to actually do mouth-to-mouth for the first time in my life.”  

Aly now recommends caregivers keep barrier devices in their vehicles, “just in case.” Although emergency departments deal with unexpected situations frequently, having solid policies and processes in place enables caregivers to “focus on the task in front of them,” Aly said. “The perception is that it’s stressful, but to be honest, day-to-day life is more stressful, because at Intermountain there’s an algorithm to follow, and we have so much training. You know that you do A, B, C, and D.”  

Outside of the hospital, a caregiver has fewer or none of those supports, which makes being mentally prepared for anything is important, she said. 

“You’re never fully prepared, so you have to know when not to act, too,” Aly said.  

Amazingly, just six months after she performed road-side CPR, Aly witnessed another auto-related mishap. This time it was a high-speed collision between a pickup and a car that sent the car hurtling down a hillside. Aly ran down the hill to the car, anticipating the occupants would be seriously injured, but was relieved to find their injuries were not serious. 

The Park Record in Park City ran an article about Aly’s double heroics under the headline, “Trauma nurse finds herself an angel twice over in half a year.” For Aly, such events are all in a day. In 2020, as the pandemic began, she was one of the first Utahns to volunteer at New York City hospitals.  

“That experience definitely made me a better nurse,” Aly said. “It was a scary time. I wrote up my will, threw some scrubs in a bag, grabbed an N95, and got on a plane. All the rules we followed my whole career changed to ‘Just do your best.’ It was nursing on steroids.” 

Caregivers often wore garbage bags instead of protective gowns, used the same masks for days, and ran out of crucial items. The person who welcomed Aly to the facility soon died of COVID themselves. 

“We’d run out of every size needle except one, for example,” she recalled. “We are so lucky to have the resources we have at Intermountain.”  

Aly recently graduated as a nurse practitioner. In October, she will transfer to Intermountain’s St. Mary’s Regional Hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado, but she celebrated the moment with emergency department caregivers in Park City. 

“I celebrated my graduation with them because those are the people who saw me studying at night,” Aly said. “They become like a second family. Unfortunately, we’ve also had loss in our own department, and it makes you really aware of who you’re working with, and that you need be there for each other. It does bring you close to save lives together on day-to-day basis. You love them.” 

“I think there’s just something in some of us that drives us to certain careers,” she added. “I’m a natural do-something-er, so you run into the fire, and that’s true of most of my colleagues. I’m great at taking action, and that was helpful (in the two incidences). I’m not great at waiting and seeing. I wanted to do something productive and helpful, so I became a nurse.” 

Nurses aren’t the only caregivers who can and should respond in emergencies, Aly noted. All caregivers are invited to take a Stop the Bleed class and review the B.E.F.A.S.T. stroke reminders.