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Tess Feury Enters Eagle Camp After Saving a Life

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Tess Feury Enters Eagle Camp After Saving a Life

KJ Feury in her uniforms, with her mom, KJ, by her side (Photos USA Rugby, NJ Daily Record)

The USA Women's National Team is in assembly in Glendale, Colo. getting ready for a two-game series against Canada, and slowly the team has started to realize that one of them is a life-saver.

Last weekend Tess Feury was part of a team of medical professionals, spectators, and players who save the life of Montclair Men's Club player Tevita Bryce. Feury, who is a trauma nurse, following in the footsteps of her mother, KJ, who was also part of the team, rushed in to help Athletic Trainer Diana Angi Stravrou when Bryce went into cardiac arrest. They used compressions, breathing assistance, and, ultimately, an Automated External Defibrillator machine to bring Bryce back—twice—and keep him alive long enough for him to get to a hospital. Bryce is recovering at home now with his family and his wife told GRR that she was immensely grateful to the people who helped him stay alive.

The Full Story is Here>>

For Feury, it was an almost surreal experience, especially given that soon after she was on a plane to Colorado to be with the Eagles.

"I was shaking for hours afterward," Feury told Goff Rugby Report. "The adrenaline and then the comedown—it's pretty strong. I have done CPR many times but always in the hospital. To do it out on a rugby field, with my friends and clubmates and people I know just watching was really strange."

Feury became a nurse thanks to the inspiration of her mother, who is hugely active in the Morris Rugby Club and New Jersey rugby scene. KL has inspired many of the next generation to be nurses, and certainly their actions last week will inspire more.

"The thing about it is you have to be a team when you provide CPR, because, as my mom always says, you don't want to just provide CPR, you want to provide high-quality CPR," said Feury. "He was a big guy, a really big guy, so it was a lot of work to do the compressions. I saw my mom getting tired and said 'mom, let's switch out,' and then we switched out and then Will [Kimball, a Morris player] came over. He said 'I'm a cop' and, OK, he knows what to do, and we put him in the rotation."

You can't get tired when you're doing high-quality CPR, but it is tiring, so it was hugely important for them to all work as a team, which they did.

"It was amazing; everyone was doing what they needed to do, no one was overstepping," said Feury. "If you weren't doing compressions you were working on his airway, cutting off his shirt, checking his pulse, or getting the AED ready."

Bryce was brought back and the players and fans all started to cheer, but Feury knew better.

"I was thinking 'don't clap yet, we're not out of the woods,'" said said. "But I also realized there was so much tension that to clap and cheer was what they needed. It was definitely emotional."

They brought Bryce back a second time and then when the EMT's arrived he needed to be revived a third time in the ambulance. But he made it to surgery where a blood clot was removed.

Funds are being collected to help pay for Tevita Bryce's rehab and care going forward>>

"Everyone in the Morris Rugby Community knows my mom and I are nurses, and they know other players are cops or firefighters, but you don't really think about it when you play or are at training," said Feury. "But then there they are seeing what you do and it's different, and you look at people differently. My two passions, rugby and nursing, came together at that moment. What I liked is how it was what my mom calls 'a team save.' We did it together."

(True, but having someone with KJ Feury's leadership and record of hundreds of CPRs in her career was an added bonus.)

After Bryce was taken to the hospital, the group who saved him gathered for a debrief, as you would with any major event in a hospital. This was a chance to see if there had been any problems, but it was more a mental-health check on everyone involved.

And thanks to KJ Feury, the Morris Rugby Club has an AED at every game, an investment that saved a life.

"Here with the Eagles, it's funny, I went out to training and was looking for the AED," said the former Penn State All American. "I've never really thought about it too carefully before but I looked for it and there it was, next to the water jug, not hidden in a gym somewhere, but right out there."

It was a bad break for Tevita Bryce that he had a blood clot that stopped his heart and almost killed him, but he was also lucky, because when the event happened, he was with people who could call 911, and medical professionals who knew what to do in such a crisis. So it was serendipitous in some ways.

"The weird thing is that I haven't been out to a game in a while," said Feury. "I like to go see [brother] Jake play, and I hadn't all fall and just went to this one game."

Well, if you were going to go to one game, this was the game to be at.