Emergency responder humbled by honor

WASILLA — The widow of a fallen medic honored posthumously last year as the state’s responder of the year now has a second such award to put on her shelf.

Virgie Hartley-McKeown has been a responder with the Willow, Sunshine and Talkeetna ambulance services for 15 years. She received her award Nov. 15 at a banquet in Anchorage. Her husband, Tim McKeown, died of a heart attack two years ago as the couple arrived together on scene of a medical call. They were the first on scene. The ambulance was on its way.

Reached Friday by phone at her home in Willow, Hartley-McKeown was humble and pleased, but slightly chagrined by the award.

“Who am I? I’m just one little person out here,” Hartley-McKeown said. “I’m standing in awe about this award. I do the best I can and I just don’t know what to say.”

Hartley-McKeown said that, in her view, an ambulance crew works as a team and she doesn’t think she stands in any way above her teammates.

She and her husband were working as a team the night he died. When McKeown fell, she began CPR, operated a defibrillator and waited for the ambulance. But Tim was gone.

And despite that experience, she’s continued responding to calls, just as she has for the last 15 years. Well, 40, if you count time spent in ambulances and emergency rooms in the Lower-48.

She’s the one who got McKeown into a medic’s uniform, and they weren’t the only members of her family who took up responding. According to a Mat-Su Borough press statement, her son Christian Hartley is an EMT and a firefighter, her daughter-in-law Alma Hartley is an EMT and her daughter, Carol Stater, worked for 20 years a LifeGuard air ambulance dispatcher.

Christian Hartley said in an e-mail that the banquet crowd was taken aback upon hearing his mother’s story.

“The audience at the ceremony gave her about a three-minute, very loud standing ovation,” he said. “When people in the audience heard that she had done CPR on her own husband, lost him, and still keeps responding … there were a lot of tears and gasps in the crowd, including some members of the awarding Ccouncil.”

Hartley-McKeown’s supervisors had glowing things to say about her as well.

“If I’ve got a critical, I send her to the patient,” Willow Fire Chief Lance Barve said. “I trust her skills. I know she won’t get rattled.”

“She’s a good medic in the field, stays calm, and keeps others calm,” said Willow ambulance chief Carol Johnston.

In her years on the job, Hartley-McKeown has picked up numerous stories — gurneys rolled out onto unstable docks, rescuers called out to “save” an adult-sized blow-up doll. She’s written a number of them down in as-yet unpublished short stories she shares with family and friends. Through it all, she said, it’s been her desire to help people that has pushed her along.

“To me when you run out of compassion then you quit,” Hartley-McKeown said.

She said a responder has to have empathy for the people she’s saving.

“I don’t care if they’re a drunk or what they are. If you can’t have empathy, it’s time to take a day off,” she said.

And, with that, she had to hang up the phone. It’d been a long day. She wasn’t feeling great, but she was needed to make a rescue call.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.