Peak 2 Peak Safety

02/25/2026

He was a janitor with no formal training who’s saved thousands of children and trained surgeons for 40 years before receiving any recognition.

Nashville, Tennessee, 1930.
Vivien Thomas was born into the Jim Crow South. He was Black in a world that told him what he could and could not become.

He wanted to be a doctor.

He worked as a carpenter and saved every dollar to attend the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial College. He planned to go to medical school.

Then the Great Depression hit.

The bank where he kept his savings collapsed. His money was gone. So were his plans.

At 19, Vivien took a job at Vanderbilt University Hospital. He earned 12 dollars a week as a laboratory assistant. He worked in the lab of Dr. Alfred Blalock.

He was expected to clean, care for animals, and stay quiet.

Instead, he watched.
He listened.
He asked smart questions.
He understood what the experiments were trying to do.

Dr. Blalock noticed. He began teaching Vivien surgical skills.

Vivien had never been to medical school. He had no degree. But he had sharp eyes, a strong memory, and steady hands. Soon, he was performing complex surgeries on lab animals. His stitching was careful and exact. His knowledge of anatomy was deep.

By 1933, he was no longer just an assistant in practice. He was Blalock’s research partner. But officially, he was still paid and treated far below his real role.

In 1941, Dr. Blalock moved to Johns Hopkins Hospital to become Chief of Surgery. He agreed to go only if Vivien came with him. The hospital allowed it. But they gave Vivien a lower-status technical title.

Then came their biggest challenge.

Babies were dying from a heart defect called ‘tetralogy of Fallot’. People called it ‘Blue Baby Syndrome’. The babies’ skin turned blue because their bodies were not getting enough oxygen. Most did not live long.

Dr. Helen Taussig asked if a surgery could increase blood flow to the lungs.

Blalock turned to Vivien.
“Can you figure this out?”

Vivien went to work.
For months, he practiced on dogs. He tried again and again. He had to create new methods. He had to design tools. No one had ever done this before.

Finally, he developed a way to connect the subclavian artery to the pulmonary artery. The new path lets more blood reach the lungs.

It was bold.
It was risky.
It had never been tried on a human.

On November 29, 1944, they operated on a baby girl named Eileen Saxon. She was 15 months old and weighed only nine pounds. She was dying.

Dr. Blalock performed the surgery. Vivien stood behind him on a step stool. He quietly guided every move.

“Deeper.”
“A little to the left.”
“Use smaller sutures there.”

Blalock held the tools. Vivien directed the operation.

After four and a half hours, it was over. Eileen’s blue lips turned pink. Her fingers turned pink. Oxygen was finally reaching her body.

The surgery worked.

The procedure became known as the Blalock-Taussig Shunt. It changed medicine. It saved thousands of children. It helped create the field of pediatric heart surgery.

Dr. Blalock became famous.
Vivien did not.

For 22 years, Vivien trained surgical residents at Johns Hopkins. Many of them became leaders in heart surgery. They learned their skills from him.

But he was not called Doctor. He was not listed as faculty. He ate with the maintenance staff.
His name appeared on no papers.

In 1971, after four decades of work, Johns Hopkins promoted him to Instructor of Surgery. Not Professor. Instructor.
By then, the surgeons he had trained knew the truth.

In 1976, the hospital honored him with a portrait. It was placed beside Blalock’s. At the ceremony, former students stood and applauded. Some cried.

They knew who had taught them. They knew who had built the foundation.

That same year, Johns Hopkins awarded him an honorary doctorate. At last, he was officially Dr. Vivien Thomas.
He was 66 years old.
He had been doing the work of a surgeon for 46 years.

Dr. Vivien Thomas died in 1985 at age 75.
In 2004, HBO released a film about his life called Something the Lord Made.

Today, students study his work. Scholarships carry his name. The surgery he created is still saving lives more than 80 years later.

For most of his career, he was paid and treated far below his true ability.
He stood on a step stool so others could stand in the spotlight.

He kept working.
He kept teaching.
He kept saving lives.

They called him a janitor.
History calls him a hero.

02/25/2026

Fascinating tale of how the first pacemaker was invented

Wilson Greatbatch reached into his box of parts without looking closely. His eyes were tired after hours at his workbench. He needed a resistor. He grabbed one. The color bands looked right in the dim light.

They were not.

It was 1956 at the University at Buffalo. Greatbatch was an electrical engineer trying to build a device to record heart rhythms for research. Nothing big. Just a recorder to help doctors listen to the heart.

He soldered the wrong resistor into the circuit. He used a 1 megohm part instead of the 10 kiloohm he needed. He connected the wires. He turned on the power.

The circuit did not record anything. It began to pulse.

Blip. One second of silence. Blip. One second of silence.

Greatbatch watched the green line on his oscilloscope. A spike appeared for 1.8 milliseconds, then disappeared. Exactly one second later, it came back. Perfect rhythm. Perfect timing.

This was not a failed recorder. It was something that created rhythm instead of recording it. The mistake was beating like a real heart.

“I stared at the thing in disbelief,” he later wrote, “and then realized this was exactly what was needed to drive a heart.”

He had seen a heart block before. When the heart’s electrical system fails, it can stop beating properly. In the 1950s, this often meant death.

The only treatment was harsh. External pacemakers were as big as televisions. They plugged into the wall. They sent strong shocks through the skin. The shocks burned the chest. Patients screamed. They could not leave the room because they were tied to a power cord.

If a storm cut the electricity, the machine stopped. The heart stopped. The patient died.

Greatbatch looked at his small circuit. It fit in his hand. A new thought came to him. It did not need to stay outside the body. It could go inside.

Doctors had a firm rule. Electronics do not belong inside the human body.

The body is wet and salty. It destroys metal quickly. It rejects foreign objects. Batteries then contained toxic chemicals. Putting one inside a person seemed dangerous.

Most experts agreed. External machines were painful, but safer than putting electronics in the chest.

Greatbatch went home and checked his savings. He had 2,000 dollars. It was his only safety net.

He did not wait for approval. He cleared space in his barn in Clarence, New York. He withdrew the money. He told his wife Eleanor they would grow vegetables to save money. He quit his job.

For two years, the barn became his lab. The hardest problem was protecting the device from the body.
He wrapped parts in tape. Fluids got in. He tried epoxy. It cracked. He tested different rubbers and plastics. Each failure costs money. His savings were shrinking.

Doctors warned him. “The battery will die,” they said. “Then you must cut them open again.”

Engineers warned him too. Corrosion. Battery life. Legal risk.

He kept going. He worked through winter with a wood stove. The barn smelled of solder and chemicals. Eleanor helped test parts at home.

He found support from Dr. William Chardack at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Buffalo. Surgeon Andrew Gage joined them. They tested the device in a dog in 1958.

The dog’s heart began beating in time with the device.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Chardack said.

It worked for four hours before fluids damaged it.

Greatbatch improved the design. He found a special epoxy used for boats. He remade the device. This time it lasted days. Then weeks.

On June 6, 1960, a 77-year-old man with complete heart block was dying at Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo. His heart beat so slowly he often blacked out. He even wore a football helmet to protect his head from falls.

There were no options left.

Surgeons opened his chest. They attached wires to his heart. They placed Greatbatch’s small device in his abdomen. They closed him up.

Everyone waited.
Lub dub. Lub dub.
They turned off the external machine. They unplugged it from the wall.
His heart kept beating.

For the first time in the United States, a fully implanted machine was keeping someone alive.

The man left the hospital. He lived 18 more months and died from other causes.

In 1960, nine more patients received Greatbatch’s pacemakers. One young factory worker recovered, found a new job, joined a bowling league, and was still alive when Greatbatch met him again 30 years later.

The biggest problem was battery life. Early patients needed surgery every two years.
In the early 1970s, Greatbatch developed a lithium iodide battery that lasted more than 10 years. That design is still used today.

He held over 150 patents. In 1970, he founded Wilson Greatbatch Ltd, later called Greatbatch Inc. It became a major maker of implantable lithium batteries.

He believed his discovery was guided by God. “The Lord was working through me,” he said.

Today, nearly one million pacemakers are implanted each year around the world.
Millions of people walk with a small device inside them, keeping steady time.

It began because one tired engineer picked up the wrong part, saw what it could do, and refused to ignore the rhythm of a human heart.

Wilson Greatbatch died on September 27, 2011, at age 92. His barn in Clarence still stands as a reminder of what one person with 2,000 dollars and an accidental discovery can do.

01/12/2026

When hearts stopped in 1952, doctors could only wait for death. Dr. Paul Zoll refused. He placed electrodes on a dying man's chest. The heart responded. Everything changed.
He stood beside patients everyone else had given up on. He watched hearts stop and refused to accept that stopping meant the end.
His name was Dr. Paul Zoll.
In the early 1950s, when a heart went still, doctors could only wait. If it did not restart on its own, the patient died. Zoll challenged that finality.
The mission began in 1947.
A woman under his care at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston suffered from fainting spells caused by increasingly prolonged periods of cardiac arrest. Despite his efforts, she died. An autopsy revealed her only heart abnormality was a faulty electrical system.
Zoll was devastated. "This should not happen to a heart perfectly normal except for a block of conduction," he said. "It should be possible to stimulate the heart."
He remembered something from his work as a military surgeon during World War II. He and cardiac surgeon Dwight Harken had removed shrapnel and bullets from inside and around soldiers' hearts. They discovered the hearts contracted from the slightest electrical stimulus during surgery.
If a heart could be stimulated during surgery, Zoll thought, why not from outside the chest during cardiac arrest?
He began experimenting.
In 1952, he treated his first patient—a 65-year-old man with end-stage coronary disease, complete heart block, and recurrent cardiac arrest. The man's heart stopped. Zoll placed electrodes on his bare chest and delivered controlled electrical pulses from a bulky experimental pacemaker borrowed from Harvard Medical School.
Two-millisecond duration pulses. 100-150 volts. Sixty stimuli per minute.
The heart responded. It beat again. Then again.
Life continued where it had been expected to end.
Zoll maintained the man's heartbeat externally for 52 hours. The patient survived for six months—time he would not have had.
When Zoll reported his findings at a 1952 scientific meeting, the reception was skeptical. A close friend and leading cardiologist turned to Zoll's wife and said the device was "a toy that would have little medical use."
At first, the method was questioned. The equipment was crude—a bulky machine on a cart that had to be plugged into an electrical outlet. The shocks were painful, causing violent chest muscle contractions.
But the patients lived. Hours became days. Days became proof.
Zoll pressed forward.
In 1953, he developed something equally revolutionary: alarmed cardiac monitors. Working with engineer Alan Belgard of the Electrodyne Company, Zoll created a way to display the heart's electrical activity on an oscilloscope screen. The device registered each heartbeat with an audible signal and sounded an alarm at the onset of cardiac arrest.
For the first time, doctors didn't have to watch constantly. The machine watched for them. These monitors became the foundation of modern coronary care units.
Then, in 1956, Zoll did something even more unsettling.
He stopped chaotic heart rhythms—ventricular fibrillation that would otherwise be fatal—using electrical shock through the chest wall. Before this, doctors had to open the chest surgically to shock the heart directly. Zoll made it possible without cutting anyone open.
Death was no longer immediate. It could be interrupted.
He applied shocks of up to 750 volts across the chest. The technique worked. Patients in ventricular fibrillation—their hearts quivering uselessly—were shocked back into normal rhythm. External defibrillation became standard practice.
He did not stop there.
By 1960, working with thoracic surgeon Howard Frank and engineer Alan Belgard, Zoll helped develop long-term implantable pacemakers. They implanted their version in an adult patient, becoming the second team in the world to do so.
Shortly afterward, they became the first team in the world to implant a long-term pacemaker in a child—an eight-year-old whose heart could now beat reliably without external machines.
Hearts that would have stopped could now be kept alive indefinitely.
Entire hospital units were built around ideas he had tested quietly at the bedside. Coronary care units. Emergency defibrillation protocols. Cardiac monitoring systems. All descended from Zoll's innovations.
For years, his name stayed out of public view. Patients survived and moved on. Machines multiplied. Credit scattered across dozens of contributors and manufacturers.
Only later did recognition catch up.
In 1973, Zoll received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research—one of medicine's highest honors, often called "the American Nobel."
By then, his work had already reshaped survival itself.
He became known as "The Father of Modern Cardiac Therapy." But the title came decades after the discoveries that earned it.
In 1980, at age 69, Zoll co-founded ZOLL Medical Corporation. The company bearing his name continues manufacturing the defibrillators, pacemakers, and cardiac monitors descended from his original machines. Today, ZOLL equipment is found in ambulances, hospitals, and public spaces worldwide.
The Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs) now mandated in airports, schools, and health clubs trace their lineage directly to Zoll's 1956 external defibrillator.
It is estimated that more than 500,000 patients in the United States alone are kept alive by implanted pacemakers descended from the technology Zoll pioneered.
Approximately 450,000 Americans experience sudden cardiac arrest each year. Many survive because of machines and protocols Zoll developed in the 1950s—decades before their widespread adoption.
Paul Zoll died on January 5, 1999, at age 87.
His legacy lives in every coronary care unit, every implanted pacemaker, every defibrillator that delivers a life-saving shock.
Paul Zoll did not invent hope.
He proved that stopping was not the same as ending.
He stood beside dying patients and refused to accept finality. He delivered electrical pulses to still hearts and made them beat again. He created machines that could watch for cardiac arrest and sound alarms before death arrived.
He made death interruptible.
And in doing so, he gave millions of people something they never would have had otherwise:
More time.

09/26/2025

06/04/2025

In Alberta, a Green Sleeve is crucial—it tells paramedics your medical wishes and history, helping them make informed decisions in an emergency.

Do you know what a Green Sleeve is? A Green Sleeve is a green plastic pocket that contains important health information, such as if you want to be resuscitated. It is recommended that everyone have a Green Sleeve setup even if you do not have a serious illness.
Interested in learning more about Green Sleeves or wanting to setup a Green Sleeve? Visit our website https://bowvalleypcn.ca/social-worker/ to learn more about how to book an appointment with our Community Social Worker!

04/13/2025

⚠️ Tomorrow at 10:00 am, ID 9 (the Lake Louise area), Canmore, Banff, the MD of Bighorn, and Yoho National Park/Field, B.C. are simultaneously testing the Voyent Alert notification system.
In a real emergency, Voyent would be used to send you critical updates that would help protect you, your family, and those around you.

🔗 If you haven't signed up for Voyent Alert yet, visit register.voyent-alert.com or download the Voyent Alert app from Apple or Google Play stores.

No matter where you are living, working, or playing in the Bow Valley, you can count on getting the critical information you need, when you need it, and how you want it.

04/13/2025

Many Parks Canada emergency and maintenance vehicles are equipped with light bars or beacons. 🚨

❗ If you see roadside flashing lights while driving through the national parks, you must act accordingly.

In British Columbia, when passing roadside vehicles with lights activated, drivers must slow their speed to:
🛣️ 70 km/h when in an 80 km/hour or over zone
🛣️ 40 km/h when in an under 80 km/hour zone
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/driving-and-cycling/road-safety-rules-and-consequences/slow-down-move-over

In Alberta, motorists must slow to 60 km/hour or the posted speed limit (whichever is lower) when passing stopped vehicles with flashing lights. https://www.alberta.ca/roadside-worker-safety

Drivers should move into the far lane wherever possible to provide additional space to roadside workers. ↔️

03/27/2025

Throwback Thursday, slashed but saved.
March 22nd 1989, as players collided during a game between his Buffalo Sabres and the St. Louis Blues, the skate blade of the Blues’ Steve Tuttle slashed Sabres goalie Clint Malarchuk’s internal carotid artery. Despite suffering massive blood loss, Malarchuck was able to skate off the ice.

The quick thinking of the Sabres’ athletic trainer Jim Pizzutelli saved Malarchuk’s life. Pizzutelli, a former Army combat medic who served in Vietnam, gripped Malarchuk’s neck and pinches off the blood vessel, not letting go until doctors arrived to begin stabilizing the wound. The team doctor applied extreme pressure by kneeling on Malarchuk’s collarbone, a procedure designed to produce a low breathing rate and low metabolic state.

Malarchuk was conscious and talking while he was transported to the hospital, and jokingly asked paramedics if they would bring him back in time for the third period. The game resumed when league personnel received word that Malarchuk was in stable condition.

Malarchuk ended up losing 1.5 liters of blood, one-third of the blood in his body, and three-hundred stitches were needed to close the six-inch wound. It is estimated that if the skate had hit 1/8 inch higher on his carotid, he would have been dead within two minutes. Instead, the goalie was back on the ice in ten days.

03/21/2025

The Heimlich maneuver, wouldn’t be developed by Dr. Henry Heimlich until 1974.

Dr. Heimlich first described the procedure in the medical journal Emergency Medicine, demonstrating that abdominal thrusts could effectively force out a blocked object by creating pressure in the diaphragm.

The maneuver quickly gained recognition and was widely adopted by emergency responders and medical organizations. Over time, some guidelines evolved to include back blows as a first response before abdominal thrusts, but the Heimlich maneuver remains a critical life-saving technique for choking emergencies, particularly in adults.

Interestingly enough, Dr. Heimlich didn’t actually use the Heimlich maneuver to save someone’s life until he was 96 years old, four decades after he invented it.

02/24/2025

Great job by the bystanders 💚

02/24/2025

In 2011, more than 20 people took turns performing CPR on Howard Snitzer for over 90 minutes outside a Minnesota grocery store. Snitzer had suffered a heart attack. Paramedics arrived by helicopter.

02/17/2025

Splinting in Workplace First Aid

Improvised splints aren’t just for the backcountry—they can provide crucial support and pain relief in the workplace while waiting for emergency services.

In our training, we teach practical splinting techniques using common workplace items, helping you stabilize injuries quickly and effectively.