As Firefighters Knocked Down Fire, EMT Saves Cat With Oxygen

OAKDALE, CT — Cats rule the internet. Images of cats mostly make us laugh or smile. This image will make you cry, in a good way.

Early Wednesday afternoon, volunteer firefighters from the Chesterfield, Oakdale and Mohegan fire companies, along with Montville career firefighters, responded to a house fire on Glendale Road. They made quick work of the fire inside the home, extinguishing it with a water can.

As firefighters were at work, Chesterfield firefighter/EMT Amie Barnes saw that a "feline member of the family" was suffering from smoke inhalation and needed oxygen.

So Barnes did what she was trained to do, albeit not usually on a cat. When asked if this was a first, Barnes laughed: "Yes!"

"I've given oxygen to patients," Barnes told Patch, "but never to an animal."

Barnes said that she lives near the house firefighters had responded to. She's seen the woman who lives there walking her cat. And when the woman was frantically looking for her cat, whose name is Luminescence, and then found him, he was struggling to breathe.

"She was very upset about her cat. She thought she lost him and then, when he was found, his breathing was funny. So I ponied up and got an oxygen tank and a mask and did what any living being and loving person would do." Because, she said, lives, including those with four legs, matter.

Barnes said she did try after administering the oxygen to get an O2 reading but could not, though she said believed he "was doing good." His owner would take him to the vet to be checked out just in case.

Barnes became an EMR three years ago. Then, an EMT. Last year, she said, "Let's do this," and became Fire 1 certified.

She'll be 50 in March.

"I had to prove it to myself I could do it," she said.

A licensed massage therapist too, her "first passion is being an EMT."

And becoming a Fire 1?

"I wanted to prove to myself that older women can do it," she said. "We can do it."

And though she could go to a professional company that pays her, she chooses to be a volunteer.

"Volunteer firefighters often go beyond routine medical calls for humans, and suppressing fires. Sometimes on the scene of call, off to the side, away from the action firefighter/EMTs are focused on the four legged family members in need of care at a scene," Chesterfield Fire Company public information officer Steven Frischling, and darn good photographer, noted.

We agree! Shout out to all first responders, and especially to the volunteers!