Alan Anderson didn’t think he’d ever be compared to an angel.
Dentists don’t hear that much.
But he was likened to a visitor from Heaven — for saving the life of a critically injured motorist who was stuck in an SUV, unconscious, bleeding heavily from large facial injuries and having trouble breathing.
“To us, he’s like an angel for being there at that time,” said Heriberto Jimenez, 25, of Brush Prairie, brother of the injured man, Jose Guadalupe Jimenez, 27.
“My mom and dad would love to thank him and talk to him,” Heriberto Jimenez said Friday.
Officials with Clark County Fire District 3, which serves the Hockinson area, also appreciated what Anderson did.
This month, they presented him with a lifesaver award for keeping Jose Jimenez’s airway open until firefighters and paramedics arrived.
“I would have hoped that anyone would have had a CPR course and would do the same thing,” said Anderson, a dentist in Vancouver for 30 years who recently sold his practice on Mill Plain Boulevard.
“I happened to be the person who was along right after the accident.”
Shortly after 7 a.m. on Dec. 21, Anderson was headed east on Northeast Rawson Road toward Larch Corrections Center, where he works part-time as a dentist for the minimum-security prison.
Jimenez was also driving east, in his blue 1991 Chevrolet Blazer.
On a curve in the 25500 block of Rawson, Jimenez veered across the center line and collided head-on with a westbound Subaru driven by Carlin M. Isaacson, 20, of Brush Prairie, according to a report by the Clark County Sheriff’s Office.
Jimenez may have fallen asleep before the crash, the report said.
When Anderson saw the heavily damaged cars, he stopped and learned that one driver was in serious danger.
Walking to the SUV, Anderson asked the injured man if he was OK, but there was no response.
Bleeding from the large facial injury and with his head on the steering wheel, Jimenez was making gurgling sounds.
“He was unconscious and slumped over,” Anderson said. “He was having trouble breathing, and you could hear that.”
Pulling the Blazer’s door open, Anderson felt Jimenez’ carotid artery and detected a pulse.
The dentist then used the “head-tilt chin-lift” that’s taught in emergency medical classes when there’s no indication a victim’s neck is broken.
Anderson pulled Jimenez’s head up from where it was resting on the steering wheel and held it upright and stable.
“I just held his head in the position that would allow him to breathe without obstruction,” said Anderson, who worked as an emergency-room nurse before dentistry school.
When firefighters and paramedics arrived, they called for a Life Flight helicopter to rush Jimenez to Southwest Washington Medical Center.
At the hospital minutes after the crash, he was still unconscious and breathing with the help of an intubation tube when a sheriff’s deputy arrived in hopes of interviewing him and Isaacson.
Isaacson, who had been pinned in his car and extricated by firefighters using heavy tools, suffered wrist and leg injuries, the report said.
“I came around the corner and there he was, completely in my lane,” Isaacson told the deputy at the hospital. “I had nowhere to go.”
Jimenez has been released from the medical center and is staying with a family member in Vancouver, Heriberto Jimenez said Friday.
“He’s doing much better, but there’s some memory loss,” the brother said. “Our mom asks him, ‘Who am I, do you know my name?’ and he’ll say, ‘No.’ Sometimes 20 minutes later he’ll say, ‘You’re my mom.’ It’ll come and go.”
Surgeons placed a metal plate for his battered cheekbone, and he faces speech and physical therapy, his brother said.
Jose Jimenez had worked as a box sorter in a Portland warehouse, and it will at least six months before he can return to work, his brother said.
“Right now, we’re giving him some time and hoping for the best.”
Only recently informed of each others’ names, Anderson and the Jimenez family, including mother Rosa Maria and father Heriberto Sr., planned to contact each other, they said Friday night.
John Branton: 360-735-4513 or john.branton@columbian.com.
