Plymouth, MA Policeman Saves Life of Father Of Groom At Wedding

Photo Credit: Matt West

RIGHT MAN, RIGHT PLACE: Sgt. Jason Higgins, a 19-year veteran of the Plymouth Police Department, saved the life of a man while dining off-duty at White Cliffs Country Club.

[From article]
Mike Reynolds had just performed a beautiful song he wrote to his son and his new bride on their wedding day when the father of the groom collapsed, hurling the happy occasion into chaos.
After singing and playing guitar to a melody he penned called “I Do,” Reynolds walked over to the tables at the White Cliffs Country Club in Plymouth Saturday night to shake the minister’s hand — and his heart stopped and he sank to the floor.
Reynolds, 66, is alive today, his family happily told me yesterday, because Plymouth police Sgt. Jason Higgins happened to be dining with his family at the club that night.
“My husband actually died twice and Jason brought him back to life,” Sandy Reynolds said from her husband’s hospital room. “He’s a hero.”
Flash back to the Milton couple’s wedding Saturday night. Groom David Hazelwood said he stood with his guests for a standing ovation after his father’s performance. Suddenly his new bride, Natasha, shouted with alarm, “Your dad! Your dad!”
[. . .]
In the club’s restaurant, Higgins, 41, was out with his fiancee’s family for dinner to thank them for helping out with the couple’s 5-week-old baby girl. A club employee recognized the police sergeant.
“She started screaming my name and she needed my help,” said Higgins, a father of three who has been with the department for 19 years.
Higgins ran into the reception room as the DJ, believe it or not, was playing “Amazing Grace.” Guests were praying and crying. Reynolds wasn’t breathing and had no pulse.
Higgins got down on his knees and began doing chest compressions. A female guest set up a defibrillator and put the pads on the man’s chest. The bride’s brother administered rescue breaths.
All Higgins could think, he recalled yesterday, was, “I want to save this guy.”
It wasn’t the first time Higgins was asked to save a life while off-duty.
He came to the rescue of a choking teenager nearly three years ago by giving him the Heimlich maneuver.
[. . .]
“It was amazing,” Higgins said.
The reception erupted into applause.
Sandy said Higgins stayed with her the whole time, even holding her hand.
An assistant Culver City, Calif., school superintendent, Mike Reynolds was taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where he is scheduled to undergo bypass surgery today, his wife said.
[. . .]
“I didn’t do anything heroic. Police officers across this state provide critical care to the public on a daily basis,” he said. “We just do what we signed up for.”
But Sandy Reynolds and her family aren’t buying that. The doctors and nurses told her it was Higgins’ chest compressions that saved Mike’s life.
“Without that,” she said through tears, “my husband would not be here today.”
“I just love him,” she said of Higgins. “I’m so happy he came into our lives when he did.”

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/jessica_heslam/2016/05/heslam_cop_brings_man_back_from_dead_saves_wedding

Heslam: Cop brings man back from dead, saves wedding
Jessica Heslam

Boston Herald

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Donald Trump Helps Save Life of Child With rare Illness

The private Boeing 727 of real estate tycoon Donald Trump arrived from Los Angeles at LaGuardia Airport Tuesday morning, carrying aboard an Orthodox Jewish child with a rare and still undiagnosed breathing illness.
Notice parents did not call the Governor of California, or any of the other elected officials. The current cadre of politicians do not help vulnerable persons. Only outsiders, rogues, the uncivil ones. 

[From article]
Trump made his plane available for the special trip to New York after the boy’s parents, Judy and Harold Ten, called Trump and told him of their plight.
Commercial airlines refused to fly the child because he could not travel without an elaborate life-support system, which includes a portable oxygen tank, a suction machine, a breathing bag and an adrenaline syringe.
“Mr. Trump did not hesitate when we called him up. He said ‘yes, I’ll send my plane out,’” 29-year-old Harold Ten recalled shortly after he landed here Tuesday morning.
Asked why he thought Trump made his private jet available, Ten replied, “Because he is a good man. He has three children of his own and he knows what being a parent is all about.”
Ten said he believes that Trump fulfilled the Talmudic saying that “he who saves one person’s life is as if he saved the entire world.”
http://www.jewsnews.co.il/2015/08/13/trump-to-the-rescue-orthodox-jewish-child-with-rare-ailment-is-rescued-aboard-tycoons-jet/

TRUMP TO THE RESCUE: Orthodox Jewish Child with Rare Ailment is Rescued Aboard Tycoon’s Jet
AUG 13, 2015
by ADMIN
in JEWS IN THE NEWS

California Tries The Idiocracy

[From article]
Apparently, Pacific-corridor residents from San Diego to Berkeley had acquired the affluence not to worry so much about the old Neanderthal concerns like keeping up freeways and airports — and their parents’ brilliantly designed system of canals, reservoirs, and dams that had turned their state from a natural desert into a man-made paradise. They have become similar to the rarified Eloi of science-fiction writer H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, who live dreamy existences without any clue how to supply their own daily necessities.
[. . .]
In the last five years, they have successfully gone to court to force millions of acre-feet of contracted irrigation water to be diverted from farms to flow freely out to sea.
[. . .]
Unless it rains or snows in biblical fashion in the next 60 days, we could see surreal things in California — towns without water, farms reverting to scrub, majestic parks with dead landscaping — fit for Hollywood’s disaster movies.
Instead of an adult state with millions of acre-feet stored in new reservoirs, California is still an adolescent culture that believes that it has the right to live as if this were the age of the romantic 19th-century naturalist John Muir — amid a teeming 40-million-person 21st-century megalopolis.
[. . .]
In 2014, nature yet again reminded California just how fragile — and often pretentious — a place it has become.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370425/californias-two-droughts-victor-davis-hanson

FEBRUARY 6, 2014 12:00 AM

California’s Two Droughts
An affluent society didn’t bother to add to the inherited system of canals and reservoirs that made it thrive.
By Victor Davis Hanson

Is That All There Is?

'I Hope You Dance... '

This was written by an 83-year-old woman to her friend.

*The last line says it all. *

Dear Bertha,

I'm reading more and dusting less. I'm sitting in the yard and admiring the view without fussing about the weeds in the garden. I'm spending more time with my family and friends and less time working.

Whenever possible, life should be a pattern of experiences to savor, not to endure. I'm trying to recognize these moments now and cherish them.

I'm not "saving" anything; we use our good china and crystal for every special event such as losing a pound, getting the sink unstopped, or the first Amaryllis blossom.

I wear my good blazer to the market. My theory is if I look prosperous, I can shell out $28.49 for one small bag of groceries. I'm not saving my good perfume for special parties, but wearing it for clerks in the hardware store and tellers at the bank.

"Someday" and "one of these days" are losing their grip on my vocabulary. If it's worth seeing or hearing or doing, I want to see and hear and do it now

I'm not sure what others would've done had they known they wouldn't be here for the tomorrow that we all take for granted. I think they would have called family members and a few close friends. They might have called a few former friends to apologize and mend fences for past squabbles. I like to think they would have gone out for a Chinese dinner or for whatever their favorite food was.

I'm guessing; I'll never know.

It's those little things left undone that would make me angry if I knew my hours were limited. Angry because I hadn't written certain letters that I intended to write one of these days. Angry and sorry that I didn't tell my husband and parents often enough how much I truly love them. I'm trying very hard not to put off, hold back, or save anything that would add laughter and luster to our lives. And every morning when I open my eyes, tell myself that it is special.

Every day, every minute, every breath truly is a gift from God.
"People say true friends must always hold hands, but true friends don't need to hold hands because they know the other hand will always be there."

Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we are here we might as well dance