Saved a kid from a probable drowning and took the keys away from a drunk a couple of times but I’ve never saved anyone while swinging from a vine and someday I’m going to have to do something about that.
Once while working a crossing guard shift, I hear a startled yell and turn to see what the commotion is.
A mother had her toddler get away from her and he was bolting toward the street. Since she had always carried him across the street, I guess he wanted to go across by himself, but this was during rush-hour traffic. The mom had tried to chase him down but tripped over something and I was the only person between this little boy and the street.
Very nonchalantly I bent down and scooped up the little guy as he tried to run past me, and handed him over to his mother. She was extremely grateful, and gave me a thank-you card some time after that.
There have been numerous other incidents where people start to cross the street and I block them from going, only to see some car run a red light/stop sign. When you spend two hours a day standing at an intersection, these types of things happen quite a lot. That’s what I’m there for 
One night I woke to screaming. I pulled on shorts and ran outside. The screaming was coming from an apartment in the next building. I ran over to the apartment and guy inside was screaming and holding his arm which had blood streaming out of it. The window was broken and covered with blood. I got into the apartment after about a minute, the door was locked and I ended up crawling in the window because the guy couldn’t get to the door. I asked the guy to take his hand off his arm so I could see how bad it was. He took his hand off and blood spewed all over the place. I mean it was just shooting out of his arm. I ran to the bathroom and grabbed a towel (oddly, I almost asked the guy if it was ok to use the towel). I used the towel as a half assed tornequet/pressure bandage. The guy started going into shock so I kept him talking to keep him awake. It was a fairly surreal conversation.
After about 10 minutes EMTs showed up. The neighbors had heard the guy yelling and called 911. The first EMT walked in and saw me and the guy on the bed in an awkward position. The EMT said 'Ok, we’ve got it." I said something like ‘He’s really bleeding man, and my hands are cramping. You need to get over here’. The EMT said ‘It’s ok, you can let go’. So I let go. And blood started shooting all over the place. The EMT RAN over to the guy and I left. I got a cop to drive me to 7-11 to get smokes. It wa only when the 7-11 clerk looked at me like I was a serial killer that I noticed that I was covered in blood. My arms and legs were totally spattered with blood. I got my smokes and walked home. By that time everyone was gone, the cops, the ambulance, everyone. So I took a bath to wash off the blood and crashed.
About a week later I ran into one of the EMTs at 7-11. He recognized me and told me that the guy had to go into surgery for a couple hours to get all the stuff in his arm put back together. He also said the guy would have bled out long before they got there if I hadn’t done the tornequet thing. Apparently the guy had really cut his arm to shreds.
I never saw the guy again. His parents cleaned out the apartment the next day. I never even got his name.
On the bright side, my bosses somehow heard about the situation and gave me the day off. Paid 
Slee
You’re very welcome - and thanks for saying thanks!
And by the way, not only are many of us grateful, but some of us are awed, too. A friend of mine said Coast Guard training was significantly more hardcore than the average person realized. Ever since then I’ve had new eyebrow-raised appreciation for anyone in the CG.
In other words, are you cute?
About 20 years ago, my mom caught her leg in a tractor’s bushhog. Really mangled her ankle. As my dad’s driving her to the hospital, a half hour drive, I’m leaning over the front bench seat so I can put as much direct pressure as possible on her ankle. She’d lost a lot of blood but they were able to save her foot. What was strange, was about 10 minutes after getting there, my brother walks into the emergency room. He had seen my dad
s car driving through town and knew something was wrong when all he could see through the windshield was my butt.
Another time, as we walked into a store, Mom pops a peppermint candy into her mouth. She “breaths” it in, blocking her airway. The clerk is just staring at her horrified when I realize what’s happening. I reach over and heimlich her and the peppermint pings off the cash register. Really cool.
Heh - that depends on how much you’ve had to drink. I can be downright stunning to those who can drink a lot. 
I saved my brother’s life after he randomly went rigid and collapsed , then turned pale and stopped breathing. My legs felt like jelly for ages afterwards. 
I know that I changed my screen name many years back. Q: Why does it say that I’m Banned…?
I know I had typos galore though:
The house where instance #1 took place, FIJI, has long since been bulldozed flat. There’s some professional building there now.
In instance #2, I was only able to catch him because I was 3-4 steps away.
In instance 3, the third paragraph of sentence 2 should read "A young boy near where my son and I were climbing got his wrist caught in a bend of the ropes; the bend then closed, slicing him (It was a Freak thing…you had had to see it)
Gramatically, its “He wouldn’t climb”, not he won’t climb.
#3 The guard took the bleeding kid, but never once thanked me. Nor did the kid. Nor did his parents. I just got weird stares from people who, for the most part, just sat on their asses and occasionally pointed.
I just grabbed my kid & got out of the crowd. Never went back to Sesame Place either.
Now? Now I could add… the time I woke up in the middle of the night in the scout cabin after someone left rubber gloves on top of the wood burning stove. I got people up before the fumes got them.
The time I yanked the tricycle with the 3 year old kid on it away from riding into the deep end of the olympic sized pool at an acquaintance house. People stared llke “what do you think you’re doing?”
but I managed to keep the “Saving your effing kid, you drunk irresponsible dumb-ss sh-theads” comments to myself.
The time I slapped on the trunk of the reversing car so it didn’t run over the children walking behind it.
The time I drove 4 people w/o rides (and of the wrong color) home from an office job in JC because of the angry mob blockading the PATH station.
It was the day of the Rodney King verdict (no one in JC had JACK to do with the Rodney King thing either).
All the times I expedited gas leak and no heat orders when I worked at a utility, even during the 16 hours on 8 hours off 7 days a week that was Sandy.
I won’t say I’m the nicest person with the sweetest voice or that I always had the best Short Hills Mall customer service when working with people.
Still, when I meet my maker, I’ll spit in his eye if he says I never saved a life or made a difference.
I once talked a friend out of a suicide on the phone. It was basically hours of talking to keep her mind on other things and gain back some perspective. It was exhausting, and I’m glad I did it.
My son and I together saved my daughter’s life when she was a toddler.
We were riding in the car and both kids were in the back in their car seats. Suddenly my son says “Hamsterdaughter is choking!”
I pull over into a parking lot and yank her out of her seat. She’s conscious, but clearly in distress. I flip her upside down and give her a couple of hard whacks on the back and a nickel pops out of her mouth!
We still have no idea where she got it. Maybe she found it on the ground before we got into the car. It wasn’t until later that I realized what a close call that was. If my son hadn’t been in the car that day we probably would have driven all the way to our destination without realizing she was in trouble.
I once revived a zombie thread by posting in it. Also, I worked in medicine for many years as a respiratory therapist, and was at the right place at the right time with the right training and right equipment often enough to have saved some lives. Two instances in particular stand out as situations where the patient would probably have died were it not for my eagle eye and professional know-how.
I found a girl unconcious and covered in blood but still alive. I figured it was comming from her head because she was soaked from the head down. I saw her hair slightly raising and falling with her pulse, a little tiny 1/2" cut on her head was pumping all of the blood out of her body. I held pressure and called 911.
I have given CPR to 3 different heart attack victims only one survived. ( I don't know CPR)
I shut off the switch when a fellow mechanic was being electrocuted.
Heimlich’d a kid choking on a hot dog.
Working as a bartender a regular who was clearly loaded (he was like that before I started my shift) got up to leave and in passing said he was going home to shoot his wife and kid. I sat him back down and talked to him for the next 2 hours while I poured coffee into him until he came to his senses. I call a friend of his to pick him up and convinced him to spend a few days with the friend until he got his shit figured out.
Would he really have done it? Not sure, but he had me convinced. They’re divorced now but at least no one got shot that day.
Twice as a pool lifeguard, I pulled non-swimmers out from the deep end.
Walking through a mall parking lot (pre-cellphone days), I saw a woman standing beside the driver’s door of her car, honking the horn and yelling for help. I went over and found her husband, slumped (leaning left) in the passenger seat. He had no pulse and shallow breathing. It only took a few cycles of CPR for him to become conscious and I stayed with him til the ambulance arrived.
Eating at a local buffet with my family, an elderly woman near me was clutching at her throat; mouth and eyes wide open, and making no sounds. Her twenty-something grandson sitting across from her was panicked and frozen in place. I walked over, pulled her from the booth just as her grandson stood up, and I shouted to have someone call 911. Two Heimlich thrusts later, a piece of pork-chop dropped onto the table. She was just as calm as could be and asked her grandson to get her a cup of coffee, HOT. I advised her to sit and maybe have some water. Paramedics showed up a few minutes later, took her vitals and interviewed her. She refused other treatment and transport. The medics interviewed me as well and gave me a pat on the back and an “attaboy”. The manager was kind enough to give me a handful of cards for complementary visits to the restauarant.
I hooked a co-worker’s wife up with a cancer specialist. Her doctors told her she was terminal. At the time, my sister worked at one of the top cancer hospitals in the US. She got my co-worker’s wife’s records and sent them to the head thoracic specialist there, who promptly said something like “Yeah, I’ll take that case. What were they going to do, let her suffocate?” I know she lived an extra decade or so, at least, because of this…and was able to see her daughter grow up and graduate.
My role was small, other than getting the right people talking. But every link matters.
Heimlich maneuver twice.
Once at my brothers wedding rehearsal dinner when my brother was going to town on pot roast.
A lady I love was choking on a piece of steak.
I have an infinite amount of brownie points!
I had a successful CPR once on a child with smoke inhalation.
And in a couple scuba related incidents I figure the natural result was a trip to Davy Jones’ Locker save for my intervention.
I don’t know if it saved his life but, I had to do the Heimlich on a co-worker at lunch one day. Scared the shit out of both of us!
Probably. I’m going to say yes.
When I was maybe 13, my family was at a friend’s house, using their backyard swimming pool. One of the little girls at the pool party was evidently not as strong a swimmer as she supposed, and she began foundering, some eight feet from the edge, in water that would have been about a foot higher than her head. I was on the diving board when I saw this, so I jumped over to her, and brought her to the edge.
In 1982, I had just finished Nuclear Power training in Idaho, and driven from Idaho Falls to SoCal in an old Plymouth Fury (1970?) to take a couple of weeks leave before reporting for submarine duty in Pearl Harbor. I had agreed to sell the Fury to my younger brother, so one night I drove from my parents house in Torrance to the supermarket in Manhattan Beach where he worked to drop it off. I then walked back to Torrance (about six miles or so at about 10:00 p.m.). About a mile from my folks’ house, at the intersection of Camino Real and Torrance Blvd, I saw what looked like a body lying in the middle of the street. That’s what it turned out to be, too; an unconscious man in his late teens/early twenties. Every couple of minutes, he would thrash around for a few seconds, then go rigid, than limp. There was virtually no traffic at the time so I couldn’t flag anyone down, but at the same time, I felt nervous about just leaving him there while I got to a pay phone. Still, having few options, that’s what I did (fortunately, pay phones were ubiquitous in 1982, and I found one at the corner). I called 911, asked for an ambulance, and returned to the victim. After a few minutes, a couple of motorists did come by, and stopped to render assistance. Before the emergency vehicles arrived, I got nervous about how long it had been since his last seizure, and tried to find a pulse. Not having been trained in that, I failed to detect one. I put my ear to his chest, and couldn’t hear a heartbeat (but he WAS somewhat overweight, and wearing a thick coat). I decided that CPR would be a good idea, and directed one of the men standing by to begin chest compressions, while I began mouth-to-mouth. The first breath went right out his nose, so I pinched it shut and tried again. After the first successful breath to inflate his lungs, he began to thrash around again, so we stopped with the CPR and went back to observing him. A police car and an ambulance showed up shortly after, and the police officer managed to get him to respond almost immediately. I had placed my jacket underneath him earlier, so I retrieved it and finished walking home.
In about 1994, I performed the Heimlich maneuver on an elderly woman at the table next to ours in a Coco’s Restaurant in Huntington Beach (yes, she was choking on a piece of food at the time, what kind of a weirdo do you think I am? Sheesh. :rolleyes:).