Photog To the Rescue

KCNC (Denver) Photographer Danyelle Wyrosdick has been on the job just a few weeks, but she is already getting props for her quick thinking.

Wyrosdick arrived at a live shot location and had trouble finding Reporter Michael Abeyta. Abeyta arrived at the location earlier but while scouting out a place for the live shot, Abeyta was standing on a muddy embankment that gave way and he slid into a gulley.

He suffered a badly sprained ankle.

He said he struggled out to get out of the gulley, but eventually did, and then crawled back to his news vehicle.

That’s when Wyrosdick pulled up. She had been assigned to assist Michael with his live shot.

“I called him up, (and asked) “Where are you at?” Wyrosdick recalled. “Mike said, ‘I really hurt myself.'”

“He was in pain,” she said. He was also covered in mud and expected to be on air in 20 minutes.

“It just switched in my head,” Wyrosdick said. “I looked and I have a plastic bag. I filled it with snow and said, ‘Put this on your ankle.’ I was in first aid mode.”

She used paper towels, small rope and gauze from both their first aid kits to create padding around Mike’s swollen ankle. Then, in perhaps the most resourceful move of all, took two metal chopsticks from Mike’s cutlery set to manufacture a splint.

“He could put weight on it,” Danyelle said of the ankle.

Her work, together with some anti-inflammatory pain meds, had Mike standing in front of the camera at 5 p.m.

Wyrosdick is 1st Aid and CPR certified after working as a lifeguard as a teenager and continually updating her training. She keeps her knowledge and supplies handy for her backpacking trips into the wilderness where sprained and twisted ankles are a definite possibility.

“I just said to myself, ‘You know, he’s in some pain, let’s fix it,'” Danyelle explained. “So I fixed it.”

H/T KCNC