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Kentucky Nurse Saves Raccoon, Who Got Drunk Off of Fermented Peaches, By Performing CPR
A dumpster-diving raccoon that got so trashed on alcohol-fermented peaches it stopped breathing was saved by bighearted Kentucky nurse Misty Combs, who brought the critter back to life with CPR.
“I’ve had some pretty crazy days on the job, but nothing like this,” the 21-year health care veteran told Lex18.
“The entire time, I was afraid it’d come to and eat me up, and raccoons carry rabies — so I was afraid of that.”
The bizarre lifesaving happened as Misty and a coworker headed to their jobs at Letcher County Health Department in Whitesburg and heard a commotion in the parking lot from a nearby dumpster, where a frantic mother raccoon was trying to fish out her children.
“Our health department is right beside Kentucky Mist Moonshine, a distillery, and they had put some fermented peaches in their dumpster, and I guess the baby raccoons had gotten in the dumpster and they were stuck,” explains Misty.
“I saw that momma and she was trying so hard to get her babies back and she didn’t know what to do.”
Despite her fear of possible rabies, Misty’s “motherly instinct kicked in.”
She got a shovel and scooped out one baby, but the other was lying face down at the bottom in water mixed with booze-soaked peaches.
“He was wet and slippery and little bitty, and he stunk,” Misty recalls.
Grabbing the critter by the tail, she lifted it out but found it wasn’t breathing, so she did what a nurse does — CPR.
“Everybody around was like, ‘It’s dead, it’s not breathing.’ It had drowned, and it was full of water; you could feel the water. So immediately, I just started doing CPR on it.”
As a coworker filmed Misty doing chest compressions, which later went viral, the little furball began breathing. Fish and Wildlife officers arrived and took the animal to a veterinarian, who gave it fluids until it was sober.
The raccoon was later brought back to Misty, who named it “Otis,” after Otis Campbell, the beloved town drunk in the iconic 1960s sitcom The Andy Griffith Show, and then released it back into the woods.
