Ever save someone's life?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Yeah, well maybe. I pulled a small child off a busy road (but somebody else probably would have if I hadn’t been there).

I was driving along when I spotted a little (<2) kid standing between parked cars. I looked about; no adults. Aah, okay…

I was already going fairly slowly because it was peak hour, but I slowed the car right down to a walking pace in case the kid decided she wanted to waddle out onto the road itself. She did. Right in front of my car.

Rather than pull over and get out, I stopped the car in the middle of the lane to block the traffic. I put the hazards on, got out of the car, and held up my hand to stop the oncoming traffic. Then I slowly walked to the little girl, and crouched down and smiled at her so she wouldn’t freak at this big ugly stranger who was about to pick her up.

I picked up the kid, signalled to my wife to jump into the driver’s seat and get the car off the road, but then I looked at the houses and had no idea which one the child belonged to. I knocked on the door of the closest one, and there was no answer. Then I freaked because I was expecting a parent to realise the child was missing any moment now, and not knowing the child had made it as far as the road, would, knowing my luck, open the door just in time to see me walking away holding her, scream, and call the cops on me.

Luckily that didn’t happen, and I walked next door and saw a woman in the back yard. I called out “Is this your baby?”, and she came up and said she belonged to the house I’d just been to. I told her what had happened.

Then I acted badly. Maybe I was in shock. I dunno. I started on a monologue about how if people couldn’t look after their kids, they shouldn’t have them. blah blah. The woman must have sensed my state, and was very diplomatic.

Just then, the little girl’s mother appeared, frantic. “Have you seen Emma??”, she asked her neighbour, who was by this time holding the little girl. Then the mother saw me, didn’t know who I was, and looked a bit nervous. The neighbour handed the child over, and explained what had happened. I was still freaked out, and was about to launch into a tirade at the mother, when the fact that her child had been standing in the middle of a busy road sunk in, and she went white and burst into tears. I’ve never felt less like a hero in my life. I left her with her child, got back in my car, and got out of there.

42

Only the multidude of times I’ve had to dig a lego or some other kind of foreign object out of the mouth of one of my kids.

Oh, and that night I kept Elton John from walking head on into the deep end of the river…

43

Possibly three times.

In RSVN, one night while on perimeter guard duty I was talking to a guard in the tower using a PR 25 field radio. A storm came up and I got off the radio and closed my antenna. The other guy didn’t close his and was trying to talk to someone else. A PR 25 has a long antenn, and on top of a 25’ high tower, it is a perfect lightening rod. My buddy got hit by lightening. The two other guys on the tower with him panicked and were screaming that he was dying. I called the medics on the land-line, and climbed up the tower. (in reality, climbing up the tower was the hard part because I am acrophobic to the max.) This guy was not breathing and was bleeding badly from his mouth. He was lying on his back just quivering like a dying fish. I gave him CPR and got his heart going, and got the fragments of his teeth out of his throat to get him breathing, but he was still choking on his blood. I turned him over so the blood was flowing out of his mouth instead of down his throat. He was still basically unconscious, and had to get him off of the tower, so I got on the ladder in a crouched position and had the two guys set him into my lap between me and the ladder and sort of crab crawled down and got him on the ground. It was raining very hard, so I had to keep him in a sitting position. I covered him with a poncho liner and a poncho to keep him warm until the medics got there. The whole thing took less than 10 minutes. He was sent to Japan to recover. The radio had exploded and blew his teeth out. That’s why he was bleeding so much. When he got back to the unit from Japan, he had some very nice GI issue dentures.

The second one, I can’t say I actually saved his life, but my partner was sleeping through a very bad mortar attack. We were living in tents so there was not a lot of protection from shrapnel. I got to a bunker, but realized that my friend wasn’t with me. I crawled back to the tent and dragged him to the bunker.

At a party some guy OD’ed on heroin and stopped breathing and lost his pulse. I did the CPR thing and got him going again. He was a friend, of a friend, of a friend, and had crashed the party. For the obvious reasons, nobody wanted to take him to the hospital so I was watching him pretty close and he went out again. I went through the CPR thing again, and brought him back. The owner of the house didn’t the want the paramedics or police at his house, so we made his “friend” take him to the convenience store to call the paramedics and get him to a hospital. The friend shows up a few minutes later alone. He had dumped his buddy by the trash bin, went inside and told the clerk there was a body outside and left. The guy survived that night, but I guess it was his time to go. He was killed in a motorcycle accident a few days later.

44

I’ve done the Heimlich manuever on two different people, one of them my then-infant son. That stuff about how kids will put anything into their mouths when they are crawling around – absolutely true. It was some little plastic dingus from one of his other brother’s toys. Quentin picked it up, put it in his mouth, then started crawling towards us, making strange sounds that got our attention. By the time I picked him up to see what was wrong with him, he was blushing with anoxia. I laid him over my arm and gave him a good hit on his back. He let out a ton of drool, along with the plastic dingus. After crying for a minute, he was okay. It was me and the wife that needed oxygen after that.

Years earlier, some friends of mine and I were eating at one of these places that serve up entire sides of beef (slight exaggeration, but you get the picture). Big steaks. We were all eating, talking and laughing, when my friend Jim is suddenly quiet. I notice he starts turning red in the face, and it doesn’t look like it’s because he’s embarrassed. “Oh, jeezus,” I think, “he’s got a piece of steak lodged in his windpipe.” I bound up out of my chair and stand behind his, keeping him down because I was taught that doing Heimlich while the person is sitting is actually beneficial. So I do the usual and BAMMO! A piece of French Fry pops out…

To be fair, it was actually a steak fry, and you can choke on almost any kind of food…but, really… :rolleyes:

45

It does, thanks!

Zette

46

When I was about 9 years old I was with my dad visiting for the summer. We were house-sitting his uncle’s place which had a pool. His girlfriend was over with her 2 year old daughter. The lady proceeds to go to sleep in a deck chair, leaving her daughter running around the pool alone. At the edge of the yard, btw, with NO FENCE, was an 8 foot drop into a canal.

So anyway the kid drops her ball into the water and leans over to get it, and promptly falls in and sinks to the bottom. From the other side of the pool I dove in, grabbed the kid, and hauled her out, then went and woke up her mom. Stupid mom.

47

Lyllyan, while I appreciate the thanks, everybody does. I’m not sure I deserved it. After all, I didn’t have much say about being there. I was drafted. All things being equal at the time, I would probably have chosen to be some place else.

TV

48

Oh yeah, I had penny-colored carpet when my son was an infant, and --surprise-- there was a penny on it once, and he put it in his mouth. He stopped breathing and started making a really strange noise… I put him across my knee and smacked his back and the penny went flying out and he was fine.

I wasn’t. I still shake sometimes thinking about that. That and the time that I jumped over the place where he was sleeping on the floor once, only to realize that he had rolled over and my heel landed about 3 inches from his head. :::shudder:::

49

Thank you Nevermind.

It wasn’t calculated or thought about, just instinct really. I’d do them all over again.

50

Here’s my story! I’ve never actually written about it before so sorry if it sounds clumsy.

I was looking after learning disabled people in France and one guy had diabetes. Early one morning I entered his room and he was lying on his bed, moaning and flailing his arms about. This freaked me out because as a rule he never said a word, apart from the odd whisper (he had Down’s syndrome). I realised he was having a hypoglycaemic fit and that I’d have to inject him with glucose.

The adrenaline was flowing like anything and I actually felt quite excited by the whole situation. I rushed upstairs to wake up one of my English colleagues. I realised that I’d have to turn the guy onto his stomach to inject the stuff into his bum cheek and that I’d need help. He’s rather a heavy guy and it took several goes before he landed heavily on the floor, taking his bedside light with him. Anyway, I eventually pulled his pyjama bottoms down and stuck the needle right into his bumcheek (it was a long one – it must have hurt) and about five seconds later (it seemed that quick) he came out of his fit, returned to his normal self – it was an amazing transformation.

Anyway, what struck me about the situation is how coolly I did it – I didn’t panic, I knew exactly what to do, I didn’t baulk at pushing a five-inch needle into muscle. I was quite pleased with myself, but a bit scared too. After all, I’m not a nurse, and I could have been completely wrong – he could have been hyperglycaemic and I could have injected him with the wrong thing by mistake – I could even have killed him. So I’m glad I did it but sometimes I feel terrified by all the things that could have gone wrong.