ELIZABETHTON, Tenn. (WJHL) — An Elizabethton electric worker is being recognized after he saved a man’s life during the region’s most recent bout of severe weather.

According to city officials, lineman Steven Guyn was among those who responded to downed power lines after severe thunderstorms swept across the region on Aug. 14.

Guyn was in the Dennis Cove area, where he came across a tree that had fallen on a house.

“I told my buddy that I was with that somebody lives there, there is way too much evidence of everyday use for someone not to live there,” Guyn said in a release. “And he said that he hadn’t seen anybody but I told him that I had to check because it was driving me nuts.”

A camper was located next to the house and as Guyn was walking up the driveway, he “heard someone hit the side of the camper.”

“I walked over and I knocked on the door and I heard somebody moan. I said ‘Is anybody in there?’ and I knocked again and the door popped open on me because he must have been laying on the door and he fell out onto the ground.”

The man was having a heart attack.

“He was all kinds of different shades of white and mostly gray when we got to him,” Guyn said. “He wasn’t breathing but I knew he was alive because his eyes were kind of opening and going in and out.”

The lineman didn’t have a cell service, so he ran to two co-workers to see if they could raise someone on the radio.

“I ran down to Brandon (Shell) and Danny (Statzer), who were down in the pickup, and told them I needed to get on the radio to get 9-1-1 up there because there was a guy up there having a heart attack and it looked like he was dying,” Guyn said.

“They got on the radio and got a hold of dispatch down here and were able to get in touch with 9-1-1 but I think that the forestry service was doing the same thing. They responded in a super-good response time, but I went back to the man to check on him and I asked him if there was anything that I could do for him at all.”

The man asked for his nitroglycerin pills, which were in his car.

“We got into the car and my buddy started to feel around in his car and found his pills and I asked if he needed water and he told me to just put it under his tongue,” Guyn said. “I held his head up and stuck a nitroglycerin pill under his tongue and he asked to be laid back down.”

But, Guyn said, every time they laid the man down he stopped breathing.

“About that time, the forestry service showed up and they took him out of the camper and put him on his back and he was doing the same thing so they decided to roll him over on his side and that allowed him to breathe.”

Guyn said an ambulance then showed up to take the man to the hospital.

“When we were cleaning up the next morning, one of the people that lived at the bottom of the hill that knew the forestry service employee said that the man wanted to meet me and thank me,” he said. “He was doing well and the doctors had told him that if he hadn’t got in the ambulance or at least to a doctor’s office when he did he wouldn’t have made it two or three hours.”

A man’s life was saved because Guyn happened to be in the right place at the right time.

“I have never felt like God had stuck me in a spot before like that was where I was supposed to have been,” he said. “It would have been super easy to have passed by that house because we pass by houses all the time that have been trashed by storms.”

Guyn initially responded to the Dennis Cove area to restore power but ended up restoring a man’s life.