N.C. Police Officer Recalls Near-Death Experience

July 27--Fayetteville Police Officer Jennifer Bullington sat in Station 3 of the Fayetteville Fire Department on a recent afternoon reflecting on the day she almost died.

It was on June 17 and Bullington had a simple task -- direct traffic on Ramsey Street near Law Road as firefighters worked to cap a gas leak.

"We had the whole intersection shut down," Bullington said. "It was at the corner near Jiffy Lube."

It was almost 100 degrees in Fayetteville that day and Bullington was outside for about an hour and a half wearing black polyester long sleeves, long pants and a Kevlar vest.

Bullington started to feel sick around the time the leak was fixed. She made a quick trip into the nearby Aldi's for some water. Her condition worsened when she got back to her patrol car.

"I started coughing, I started feeling really dizzy, nauseous and I was just confused," she said. "I started dumping water on my head. I thought I was just overheated."

Bullington attempted to get on her radio, but the mixture of confusion and dizziness made it difficult.

That's when Capt. Justin Nobles of the Fire Department and firefighters Bruce Erickson and Chiara Furlanetto-Duehning drove by.

"We were leaving the call and had to go into the Aldi's parking lot to turn around," Nobles said. "We saw her standing there and I said, 'She doesn't look good.'"

His team stopped.

"Chiara helped get her vest off, we started to check her vitals and requested EMS," Nobles said. "We had her sitting in the back of the (fire truck)."

They also thought the cause of Bullington's pain was from the heat.

"I was so afraid I was going to throw up in the truck," Bullington said, laughing.

EMS arrived and she was taken to the hospital.

"(Doctors) gave me a lot of oxygen and they took a blood gas test," Bullington said. "They found out it was the gas that caused it."

When she was directing traffic, Bullington thought she was downwind of the gas leak, but she had been breathing it in.

She spent four days in the hospital. Three days after she was released, she went back.

"I woke up at 5 a.m. coughing," she said. "I went back to work and around 9:30 I was still coughing, gagging, I was throwing up."

She went back to the hospital and spent three more days there with a resting heart rate of 140.

When asked what she thinks would have happened if Nobles, Erickson and Furlanetto-Duehning didn't drive into the Aldi's parking lot, Bullington choked back tears.

"I think I would have died, honestly," she said. "No one would have called 911. I couldn't get on the radio. Who knows? I try not to think about it. I get too emotional."

For Nobles, the entire experience was simply "scary."

"Being a police officer, she's considered one of us," he said. "She's family. That's not to say we wouldn't have done anything different if she wasn't an officer though."

But often, firefighters never see the people they save again, making this experience particularly rewarding.

"This is my first time seeing them (since the incident)," Bullington said. "My 5-year-old son made a card for them that said, 'Thank you for saving my mom.' I think he likes firefighters more than police officers now."

Staff writer Nichole Manna can be reached at mannan@fayobserver.com or 486-3596.

Copyright 2015 - The Fayetteville Observer, N.C.