Sometimes, after someone has been through a traumatic car accident, they’ll recall a heroic angel who helped calm them or pulled them free from dangerous wreckage.

In Park City, that angel could well be Alice Speak, a trauma nurse at Park City Hospital who has found herself the first responder at two medical emergencies on Summit County roads in the past seven months.

Back in December, her latte run was interrupted when she saw a vehicle across the intersection she was stopped at continue past a red light and she realized the driver had lost consciousness. She sprinted across the intersection, stopped the car and administered CPR to save the driver’s life.

---

---

The driver was taken to a hospital and recovered, though the incident left her with enough unanswered questions and unexplained circumstances that she felt some higher power must have been watching after her.

Fast forward to June 3.

---

---

“Again, I was trying to decompress after a stressful day, and I was just, like, ‘I’m going to go on a mountain bike ride,'” Speak said. 

She had just finished the outdoor venture with a friend, and the two were standing on the side of S.R. 248 in Hideout and preparing to load their bikes into the back of a truck when she saw an accident across the highway that she thought surely took someone’s life: A black truck collided with a small sedan and sent it careening far below into a ditch.

“I commandeered a vehicle to get closer to the scene,” she said. “A car was just driving by, and I waved them down and was, like, ‘Hi, please take me to that accident. I’m a trauma nurse. I need to help them.'”

The initially hesitant driver followed her instructions after seeing the aftermath of the collision.

“They saw the vehicle was smoking. I thought it was going to explode,” Speak said. “The husband looked to his wife and said, ‘Call 911!'”

When the smaller car was hit, Speak said it didn’t roll — it flew into the air. The landing wasn’t soft, either. It “crushed a big part of the front of the vehicle where there was a driver and a passenger and started just smoking.”

“It was the loudest thing I can remember hearing in a long time,” Speak said.

After her impromptu driver took her close enough to the accident, she omitted what would have been her regular protocol to tell the crumpled car’s occupants not to move and instead instructed them to get out of the smoking vehicle.

She found there was a language barrier between her and the people she was trying to save, but Speak was able to recall enough Spanish to communicate the necessities. She and her mountain-biking buddy were able to get the dazed pair up away from the crash and up the hill, but not without some obstacles. They managed to get the driver out of the car first. At first, the woman tried to leave through her window, but she realized it was now mostly a mess of broken glass. She ended up getting out of the car through the passenger door.

“I walked with her up the hill, and she was really confused, bleeding from everywhere,” Speak said.

The passenger’s condition was slightly worse, and she was carried up the hill by Speak’s friend.

“Her friend who had been the passenger was hypotensive, so her blood pressure was low just because her pulse was a little bit weak,” Speak said. “She just couldn’t stand up. She couldn’t do anything.”

Looking back, Speak said neither were in as dire a condition as the driver she saved seven months before, and she thinks these occupants both had fortune on their side.

“It could have been so so much worse,” Speak said. “The car was just crumpled and smoking, and luckily it didn’t explode.”

While waiting for emergency services, Speak said the passenger — who initially thought it was January — started to improve as her blood pressure began to regulate. The woman’s shoes had been lost in the accident, and Speak and her friend had to remind her not to try to sit up from where she was lying on the road.

“It was quite a lot for them both,” Speak said.

Before she left the scene, she sent her boss at the hospital a heads up to get ready for a couple of trauma patients. But she knew that given a few days, they would be all right.

Nurse in and out of hospital

Initially from Hawaii, Speak came to Utah to attend the University of Utah and stayed out of love for her career and colleagues and adventures in the mountains.

After graduating as a nurse and working for a decade in emergency medicine, she returned to the University of Utah to complete her doctorate and qualify as a nurse practitioner.

“It was so long ago that I made that first decision to complete my undergraduate work there. It’s hard to remember the nuts and bolts,” Speak said.

Based on her good experience and given her firm place in the community, the decision to enroll in the school again for her graduate degree wasn’t difficult.

Speak said the two recent incidents that required her to step into her nurse mindset outside of her usual workspace are not so rare for people in her field.

“There have been a lot of things throughout the years that have happened,” she said. “As a nurse, we do have training to recognize things.”

Sometimes this means answering the call when flight attendants ask for medical workers thousands of feet in the air. Sometimes it means helping people who’ve had too much to drink on Main Street. Sometimes it means helping people suffering from heat at outdoor concerts.

For Speak, it also meant caring for her mother with a bilateral retinal detachment when she was 9 years old.

“She lost her eyesight, which was really difficult for her,” Speak said. “My mom’s amazing. She speaks seven languages. She’s taught English for the British Embassy in Africa. She’s not scared of anything and she’s one of the strongest women I know. So for her to go blind — especially when we were really young — she needed a lot of help, and she’s not a woman who accepts help easily.”

Speak learned to cook, though she said she’s still not good at it, and biked to the library to get audiobooks for her mother, who needed to remain in bed for several hours a day if she had a chance to keep any of her vision.

The experience showed Speak the importance of passionate caretakers who are willing to help people who are ill or otherwise afflicted.

“It’s nice to be able to do that,” Speak said. “We’re all going to need that sometime, and you’re never going to see it coming.” 

In a lot of ways, helping her mom back then is similar to how she helps people now.

“When it’s your patient, no matter what else is going on, you are their advocate,” she said. “Your job is to be there for them and protect them. And so everything is about your patient.”

Not every patient is her mother, of course, and sometimes they’re incarcerated or rude or otherwise hard to work with. But that doesn’t change the foundation of the nurse-patient relationship, she said.

“You want to advocate for them. You want the best outcome for them. You want them physically and emotionally to be OK,” Speak said. 

It was that desire to help that brought her to Manhattan during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in April through June 2020.

She was hanging out with a patient at her job at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, one of the hospitals she still works at now as needed, when a politician came on the room’s TV screen pleading for more personal protective equipment and nurses.

“I made a phone call to a friend of mine I’d done clinicals with,” Speak said, “and let him know I’ll go over, I’ll help if they need people, I’m available. And I was on a plane a couple days later to Manhattan to help out.”

She sublet an Airbnb close enough to the VA New York Harbor Healthcare System hospital where she worked so she could walk and avoid further risk with public transportation. Other than a few people on the streets, the city was shut down. From the time she left her home to the time she returned, she left her N95 mask secured over her mouth and nose whenever possible. The vaccine was only a hope or prayer in people’s minds, and she worked as many as six days a week, 15 hours a day.

The community’s gratitude came in the form of banging on pots and pans and sending first-line medical workers food. 

“It was a nice sentiment, even though I was sleepy and it was noisy,” she said. About the food, she added, “I was too afraid to eat it at the hospital, and I also happen to be a vegetarian, so I would give mine to the gentleman who was hanging out outside the 7-Eleven on my way home.”

None of that killed Speak’s resolve to be there.

“I was exhausted,” she said. “I’d do it again.”

She said the friendships she formed have been lifelong. She fondly remembered the hospital playing The Beatles’ “Here Comes The Sun” when a patient had artificial ventilation devices removed and was released.

“You’d sometimes hear that song, and you’d be wearing a trash bag because you didn’t have a gown, and it would kind of get you through your shift,” Speak said. “You’d realize, ‘OK, we’re doing something that matters. We’re making a difference. Someone just got extubated and they’re going home with their family because of what we’re doing here.’ … We all needed to hear that song when they played it, knowing what it means.” 

Speak doesn’t hope to need to save someone else’s life soon, but she’ll be ready.

For those who aren’t trauma nurses, she said bystanders can still call 911 when they witness a potentially life-threatening situation. She also recommended people take Stop the Bleed training.

“The 911 operators are trained for this. They’re trained for when you call and speak to them and you don’t know what’s happening and you’re explaining it to them. They can tell you what next steps to take,” Speak said. “If you don’t know, just call them and stay on the phone with them.”

She said they walk people through CPR and other life-saving measures.

People could also learn basic life support training through their local hospitals, she added.

“Life is hard. And sometimes you’re just trying to go on a mountain bike ride and witness a car accident,” she said. “But you can handle it. We can do hard things.”