LOL! This was the ocean, not an ER!
The first coastie to deal with Fuddy was PJ Ornot, who reported that he touched and shook her but got no response. He moved on to rescue an elderly woman about 100 yards from Fuddy.
Ultimately, it was Coast Guard rescue swimmer, Mark Peer, who fished Fuddy out of the drink. He said "She was unresponsive at which point I checked for a pulse, which I couldn't find". Peer had just rescued a man in his seventies.
Both Ornot and Peer violated Coast Guard protocols by passing Fuddy by.
They have equipped helicopters and the ability to hoist critically-injured victims to those helicopters because the people who man them are trained as EMT’s. I strongly suspect they have defibrillators on board. And even if they don’t, they have arms and mouths, and CPR is required if the person isn’t charred, isn’t stiff as a board from being dead 2 hours, and has head, heart, lungs, brain, and liver still attached to their body. “Victim is unresponsive” doesn’t cut it.
And to determine that the victim is unresponsive in the first place, they have to use the equipment in the helicopter if it is available - a stethoscope and a heart monitor. They didn’t even do that.
I know those guys are capable of better than that; they wouldn’t be where they’re at if not. So why did they violate the protocols and then go to the media and falsely say that the protocols demanded that they do what they did? Were they given orders to do exactly that? If not, then have they been disciplined for breaking the protocols?