Kentucky nurse rescues drunk raccoon, revives it with CPR

Kyle Melnick

Misty Combs and her colleagues knew something was wrong when they saw a large raccoon pacing in a parking lot near their office one morning. They looked into a dumpster full of rainwater and fermented peaches - from a nearby distillery - to find two small raccoons.

They used a shovel to pull one raccoon out of the dumpster, and it ran off with the larger one. The second small raccoon, however, was in bad shape: soaking wet, reeking of moonshine and barely breathing. Combs’s colleagues thought it was dead.

“Not on my watch,” Combs, a nurse, recalled thinking. “I’m going to try to do whatever I can do to save it.”

Combs, who is CPR trained for humans but not animals, bent over and gave the raccoon animated stomach compressions while repeatedly yelling, “Come on, baby! Come on.”

After a minute or two, the raccoon started spitting water, kicking and sticking out its tongue. Combs continued to pat its back until it appeared to breathe normally.

Combs, 43, has become a local hero since the Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Kentucky, first reported the story.

“I couldn’t leave that baby in the dumpster knowing it was drowning,” Combs said. “That’s just a part of me: to save lives and to help wherever I can.”

Employees at the Letcher County Health Department in Whitesburg sometimes see an adult raccoon and two smaller raccoons under a bridge near their office. But on August 14, the adult raccoon was alone and seemed in distress near the dumpster.

Employees heard chittering from inside the dumpster and spotted the two. The neighboring Kentucky Mist Distillery had dumped large bags of fermented peaches inside. The distillery makes infused peach moonshine that it says “is a golden blend of the freshest peaches grown in the southern region of Appalachia.”

Combs said the first raccoon stood atop the bags of peaches, so it was easy to scoop with the shovel. But the other raccoon was stuck deeper down amid rainwater.

Combs pulled the unconscious and cold mammal out by its tail. Combs, who has two children - Ford, 22, and Farrah, 19 - said her maternal instincts kicked in. Combs placed the raccoon on its back in the parking lot and began compressing its stomach with her bare hands.

Combs was careful about getting too close; she feared the raccoon - animals who frequently carry rabies - might bite her if it regained consciousness. Once it began spitting out water, someone off camera declared, “Oh, it’s puking.”

Then Combs turned the raccoon onto its right side and patted its back for about five minutes to try to help clear water out of its lungs. Employees wrapped it in a beige towel.

Combs’s colleagues called local animal control, which placed the raccoon in a cage. Combs brought the caged raccoon to a mechanical room in the back of her office building, where it hung out until the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources arrived.

Combs and her colleagues named the raccoon Otis Campbell based on the fictional “town drunk” in the 1960s programme “The Andy Griffith Show.”

Colin Fultz, owner of the Kentucky Mist Distillery, said he had “a scary few hours” after hearing about the inebriated raccoon but was relieved the mammal lived. He said he asked the city for a lidded dumpster so other animals don’t jump in and imbibe from there.

After a veterinarian helped the raccoon recover, a wildlife official drove the mammal back to the parking lot the next morning. There, Combs took a picture with the raccoon and opened its cage.

“Don’t bite me,” she said before the raccoon ran past her, into the grass and toward the bottom of the bridge.

Combs and her colleagues yelled goodbye to Otis.