On a bright, chilly winter afternoon, three men gathered in a parking lot at the Weatherbee School in Hampden.

It was a relaxed couple of minutes. The men caught up with each other’s lives, asked about family, wondered about plans for the holiday season.

After a few minutes of small talk, David Bellomy spoke.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been able to get a hold of you to thank you,” he said quietly to the two other men, Hampden Academy football coaches John Sparacio and John Chase.

That’s OK, the two men said, brushing it aside, almost embarrassed that they had saved Bellomy’s life on a Saturday in late August.

Bellomy, a bus driver who was employed at the time by First Student in Hampden, had a seizure as he ate lunch waiting for the football team to wrap up a preseason scrimmage at Winthrop High School.

“As corny as it sounds, it’s just something you do,” Chase said. “I would think that anybody in that situation would have done the same thing, although there were people standing around who didn’t. I just figured, you do what you gotta do.”

These two coaches dragged Bellomy off his bus and opened his locked jaw with a pen so he could breathe again.

Neither coach has medical experience beyond basic first aid. All they had were their wits and ability to stay calm. If Bellomy had to be in this situation, his life dependent on two near strangers, he couldn’t have two men less prepared for this moment.

Sucking for air

To this day, John Sparacio is thankful he decided to run a few extra plays during the football scrimmage.

What made him do it? Maybe he wanted to look at a few kids, or urged his team to try something again.

Whatever it was, the decision may have averted a much bigger tragedy if Bellomy’s seizure had happened while he was driving.

Sparacio and Chase had sent the kids to get showered and ready for the bus trip back to Hampden when the coaches heard a woman screaming.

Chase ran to where the two Hampden buses where parked, where another bus driver was panicking. Chase peered into the bus, where he saw Bellomy curled up in a ball on the floor. Chase tried to lift Bellomy out of the bus alone, but struggled with the 300-pound driver. Sparacio came over at that point and helped Chase get Bellomy off the bus.

Once Chase and Sparacio put Bellomy flat on the pavement, what they saw disturbed him. The driver was sucking for air.

“We couldn’t do any mouth-to-mouth because his jaw was locked,” Sparacio said. “His face was all blue. So we had to find something.”

Chase tried his finger, but that didn’t work. Hurriedly – but all the while calm – Sparacio and Chase hunted around for a stick to pry open Bellomy’s mouth.

Then, Chase noticed a clipboard for charting plays had been thrown to the ground when the coaches ran over to the buses.

Along with a pen.

Chase grabbed it, stuck it between Bellomy’s teeth, and pried open his jaw.

“When it opened up, as sick as it sounds, it sounded almost like a opening a vacuum-sealed container,” Chase said. “He was sucking so hard for air.”

But Bellomy was breathing again.

An ambulance arrived a few minutes later. Chase and Sparacio updated the emergency technicians, who loaded Bellomy into the vehicle. Chase phoned Bellomy’s wife, Valerie.

The team was waiting for another bus driver to come pick them up when the ambulance crew came back to the school.

“They told us whoever got him on his back and got his airway opened up probably saved his life,” Chase said.

In the weeks after the scrimmage, Sparacio and Chase heard bits of information about Bellomy – that he was doing better, or wasn’t, that he was home or still in the hospital.

And they thought about what they had done for this virtual stranger, how they came to help this man and the effect it had on them.

‘You can save somebody’s life’

John Sparacio has seen death.

Quick thinking, poise, calmness under pressure – John Sparacio got that from the Army, where he served in a tank during the Persian Gulf War.

Originally based in Germany, Sparacio was part of a highly ranked tank crew. That landed them a role in Desert Storm in 1990. He was in the Army until 1993 and left with a rank equivalent to a corporal.

Eventually Sparacio had experience doing everything in the tank, from driving to loading to shooting. He gained the ability to remain calm in a frantic situation.

“In the service, being in the Gulf, I’ve seen a lot of death,” said Sparacio, who now works at the Hampden post office.

“Your adrenaline starts going, but you stay in control. It’s sort of like a football game. You’re nervous, but you’re under control.”

Sparacio had some first aid, but admitted he probably wouldn’t have taken it if not for the military – where everyone goes through some kind of basic medical training – and his job as a head football coach.

That’s all changed now.

“I hear a lot of people say that they really don’t want to take first aid and I say why? You can save somebody’s life. I have a hard time believing you don’t need it. You never know when you have to be in a situation like that. You never know. It could be you,” Sparacio said.

Gaining respect

John Chase has been close to death, too, in his job as a technician at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Bangor.

He’s been called into operating rooms, told to put on scrubs so he can fix malfunctioning machines. He’s been shoved into a corner while doctors and nurses frantically tried to save a life.

“I’ve been around situations where things aren’t going quite the way the professional nurses and doctors want,” said Chase, who’s been at the hospital for 18 years. “When you’re in that situation, you have to stay calm and take control, and that’s pretty much been taught to me throughout my career.

“But hands on? That was my first experience [with someone close to dying]. And it is an adrenaline-pumping experience.”

Not only did the experience affect Chase, but he thinks it may have touched his family, too. His wife has reminded him that he saved a life. His son, Drew, was a freshman on the team this year.

“He definitely looks at me differently and I think the other kids do, too,” he said. “There was a respect there that we garnered. Drew said to me, ‘Dad, that’s incredible, you and Coach Sparacio really took control and that’s amazing.’ So it made me feel very good. It makes me feel good to help somebody out.”

Bellomy

David Bellomy can recall a lot of what happened during one of the most harrowing days of his life, but he’s missing those crucial minutes that Sparacio and Chase remember.

Bellomy, a 60-year-old who still speaks with a hint of his native New Jersey, remembers a beautiful day. He had planned a lunch of cereal bars and milk and was sitting in the driver’s seat of a yellow school bus, he recalls. He was listening to the radio and chatting with the other bus driver.

Then, something wasn’t right.

“All of a sudden I lost control of all my facial muscles,” Bellomy said on a recent morning in the warm, cozy kitchen of his home in Hampden.

“I couldn’t talk. I just kept making weird movements. They tell me I stood up from the seat and that’s apparently when I passed out. The last thing I remember is making these weird facial movements. And I think I might have turned around to get [the other driver’s] attention. The next thing I remember, I woke up in the ambulance.”

When offered the story of what happened in the minutes in between, Bellomy leans forward and his eyes widen a bit.

He recalls looking up at the ceiling of the ambulance, fighting the restraints a bit – afterward Bellomy sent the emergency workers a note to apologize for his behavior – and then going to a hospital in Augusta.

Initially, Bellomy’s spell was figured to be a heart attack. But tests showed it was arrythmia, a speeding up of the heart, which may have been brought on by the seizure.

He was transferred to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, where he had a four-way heart bypass on Sept. 9. He went home but returned to the hospital because of an infection.

All told, Bellomy was in the hospital for 42 days, dropping 40 pounds during that time. He came home in early November and has finally started to feel good again.

He’s looking for a job again, too, but Bellomy won’t go back to bus driving. That started out 19 years ago as a second job to help put two children and four stepchildren through college.

“They say my license is still valid and I could probably get a new medical certificate, but my own feeling is I wouldn’t feel right driving,” he said. “I just decided my driving days are over. I don’t want that responsibility.”

Bellomy might go back to the airline business, in which he worked for almost three decades.

You see, like Sparacio and Chase, Bellomy has the kind of background that would likely make him quick on his feet in an emergency situation. He worked for several years as an airport dispatcher for the city.

That experience, Bellomy feels, might have helped him if he had been driving during his seizure.

“The bus company did have a training course that if anything hits you, or you feel like you were dizzy or going to pass out, you pop the air brakes and keep control of the bus,” he said. “I had 30 years in the aviation business, so I’m used to going through procedures. I think I could have done that if it had happened.”

Finish

Valerie Bellomy drove her husband to the parking lot meeting with Sparacio and Chase. She sat in her car while the men had their picture taken.

The word grateful has become a big part of her life, Valerie said.

She’s grateful the two coaches were there and thought so fast to pick up the pen. She’s grateful the football players weren’t on the bus at the time. She’s grateful Chase was so calm on the phone when he called her from Winthrop.

She thinks the parents who trust their kids to men like Sparacio and Chase should be grateful, too.

“As a parent, you send your kids off to these teams and, for some people, your kids haven’t been away from home for a football game,” she said. “It’s nice to know that there’s coaches who can do those things.

“It kind of makes you tear up.”

One regret David and Valerie Bellomy have had was that they hadn’t been able to thank Sparacio and Chase themselves. That was taken care of Monday, as the three men met in the parking lot in Hampden.

“Christmas Eve, if your ears are burning,” Valerie Bellomy told Sparacio and Chase, “you’ll know why.”