Have You Ever Saved Somebody's Life.

In My Humble Opinion
1

This thread gave me a creepy feeling, so I thought I’d start this one.

I never really saved anybody’s life directly, but I thought I did once.

Heading up to go skiing with two friends. I was in the front passenger seat, when I looked back to see my friend in the back seat freaking out (he was having an epileptic seizure, but I didn’t know it). He started choking on his saliva, and I grabbed him by the collar and pulled him forward so he could drool it out instead. All the while I’m screaming at my other friend who’s driving to … “Stop, get to a Hospital, flag down a cop, do something!”

Turns out he probably would have been ok anyway, but I felt like quite the hero just by inducing him to drool all over himself.

How about the rest of you heroes?

2

I was at one of those “all you can eat” places once when a little girl of about 3 began to choke. Her stupid parents just sat there, patted her on the back, tried to get her to drink some water, etc… I got up, crossed the room, snatched her up out of her high chair, flipped her upside down and whacked her firmly on the back. Out popped a piece of food. I stood her up, made sure she was breathing okay, then went back to my seat.

3

Not sure how much of a “lifesaver” I was in this situation, but the intensity of it always stays with me so I think it’s worth a mention.

I was a college intern at a local news station several years ago. A news cameraman and I were in downtown Washington DC filming some footage outside of a school. Some women came down the sidewalk with a baby in a baby stroller and went up the stairs to the townhouse next to us. The stairs were very tall and VERY steep. One of the women had trouble with her key, so the other woman was helping her. The baby stroller started to roll off the top of the stairs and within a second was falling backwards. It had been just at that second I happened to turn around, my adrenaline kicked in and I can’t ever remember jumping so quickly to grab the stroller at the halfway point down the stairs. The women stood there stunned for a moment, and who must have been the mom started crying, running over and grabbing the baby (who was fine) and hugging me. It was just a moment in time where I happened to be in the right place at the right time, but I try not to think about what might have happened if the stroller had continued falling and the baby fell out.

4

I don’t think she would’ve done anything, but a girl called me up with suicidal thoughts on her mind and I reassured her. Pretty tough to convince her that life was worth living when I wasn’t so sure about that myself.

I pulled my brother’s sled out of the way of a falling tree once. I doubt it would’ve killed him, as only the smaller branches reached him.

I may or may not have helped to defuse another suicide/cry-for-help when an acquantance brought an unknown chemical to school and was hinting all day that he would drink it.

So that’s three sort-ofs. Nothing too dramatic, but a few good deeds under my belt.

5

I have saved a few animals, if it counts for anything. I caught a german shepard puppy as the female dog was really confused and was trying to push it, she was birthing it for clarification here, from a standing position onto a concrete slab. (I was 12 at the time, screaming for the dog’s owners kids to bring me a towel) Puppy was fine, as were all of her 7 brothers and sisters. I also was walking along a riverbank when I was 13 or 14 with some friends and kept hearing “mewing”. I hushed my friends, kept listening, then astonished them by walking into chest deep water to a small island made up of fallen tree limbs and weeds along the support post for an overhead bridge. Once there, I allowed three tiny kitten to cling to my head as I waded back to dry land. (How they got there, I don’t want to know!) Those were the most interesting, IMHO. I also have taken keys away from people I thought were too drunk to drive and given some of them a ride home myself, but that’s barely noteworthy.

6

Not alone.

However, I was an EMT for a number of years and was active both professionally and as a volunteer. There were a couple of times that I’d like to think that I (and the crew I was working on) made the difference.

Zev Steinhardt

7

Yeah, but it’s been a few months. I’m a physician, so I get a few more opportunities than other people, and its kinda expected under certain circumstances.

This is the tale of Shrimplover. He really, really loves shrimp. Unfortunately, he’s allergic to it. But he had some for lunch one day anyway. Then he started to not feel too good. So he drove to my office, where he managed to walk into the lobby, and sit in the first chair he found, as he felt he couldn’t go farther. Didn’t check in, didn’t ask for help. Just sat down.

Fortunately my Physician Assistant was walking by, and noted he wasn’t looking too hot, so she and others dragged him to the treatment room where they put him on the table and got me.

The man was a mass of hives. Even his eyelids were swollen. He looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy, did our Shrimplover. More ominously, he was bronchospasming to beat the band. So I gave him an injection of adrenaline under the skin while my nurse tried to start an IV. As she’s doing this, Shrimp starts calling out “I’m going, doc, I’m going! I can’t see you anymore!” I look at him, and sweat is running off his face in rivers, and his blood pressure is dropping, while his heart rate is increasing. Hmmm…vascular collapse, suboptimal, especially in my frigging office! Then his blood pressure disappears, he stops breathing, and his heart beat becomes extremely erratic. Technically, he is a Pulseless Nonbreather, and in many jurisdictions, he is dead.

Fortunately I’d stuffed the cuffs of my pants into my socks, so nothing leaked out. The RN had just gotten the iv in, so I gave her a syringe of adrenaline to push directly into his venous system, which she did, and with a large fluid push behind it, it reaches his heart. While we wait and I contemplate starting CPR, knowing it’s not real effective in vascular collapse.

But I’m spared from physical exercise when, after about 30 seconds, Shrimp levitates off the table, clutching his chest, and hollering “my heart doc, it’s gonna explode! My heart can’t take it!” Pressure’s up, heart’s pumping effectively, soon I’ll be able to change my pants!

He stabilizes in about 5 minutes, the paramedics come in, and ask why the hell they should take such a healthy-looking guy off to the hospital, I show them Shrimp’s rhythm strip, and they quiet down and transport him. He does fine.

I sit, do paper work, and decompress. I decide to see one last patient before my shift ends. I enter another room to find a young woman crying hysterically. What’s the matter? “I found a bug in my food! I might have eaten it! Maybe I did eat one! I need an antidote for eating a bug!”

She shows me her salad. Sure enough, there’s a potato bug drowned in the dressing. I reassure her. I tell her “in many parts of the world bugs are an important source of protein for people’s diets! This bug is not poisonous! In fact, this bug is related to shrimp. Are you allergic to shrimp?”

The above all really happened a few months ago, especially the lady with the bug in her salad.

8

I don’t know for sure that I’ve ever saved anyone’s life, but there have been a few maybes.

Once when I was a kid Friend 1 and I were visiting Friend 2, who had a pool. A could not swim very well and limited herself to paddling around in the shallow end. But later, while 1 was messing around by the side of the pool, she fell into the deep end. She went under the water and did not come back up right away, so I pulled her up by her swimsuit straps.

My sister is rather absent-minded, and I have often had to stop her from walking out into the street without looking. Several times I think I was the only thing keeping her out from under somebody’s front wheels. On one occasion I had to shove her into a snowbank to keep her from walking right in front of an oncoming bus.

9

I was on duty in my air traffic control tower, in Bad Kreuznach, Germany, on a Saturday. The only traffic was the helicopter for the parachute team stationed on our airfield. With little traffic I cleared the chopper for continuous operations. In other words he could pick up the jumpers, climb to 2000 feet, let them jump, move away, come back to pick them up again. If there was traffic I would call him.

I had a minor altimeter change and tried to call him, but he ignored me. It was not uncommon for pilots to be unhappy for pulling this duty on such a beautiful day, so I let him slide.

Our airfield was in a bit of a hole. There were ridges 10 miles in front of me, 7 miles to the left and 5 miles behind me. I had control up to 2000 and above that was reserved for the large German airbase down the road. They had lots of jets: F-4 Phantoms–awesome things.

Most of my traffic was east and west (left and right).
With the ridge so close behind me, and since we hardly ever looked that way, it was a bit of a fluke for me to spot a jet as it crossed the ridge at very a very low level headed for our field.

I grabbed the mic and tried to call the pilot but he didn’t answering me, so make a blanket broadcast: “High performance aircraft, your direction, your altitude.”

The pilot must have buried the stick because the helicopter dove straight for the earth. The jet zoomed directly over where the chopper had been and knocked the air away from his rotors. He rocked quite a bit before regaining control.

“T-thank you s-sir,” he said, “God damn that was close.”

Pilots are officers, I was a lowly E-5 at the time.

There were eight jumpers in the chopper and a crew of at least two. Two of the jumpers came up afterwards to shake my hand and offered to buy me a drink, but I passed. Going drinking with the parachute team was genuinely taking your life into your hands.

I never had any more trouble from the pilot. Someday I’ll tell you about the time we lost the General.

<pause>

Not life threatening perhaps, but when I was 15 or so, my brother and I were returning a paddle boat we took out on a lake during a vacation. It was to be returned just beyond a public peer at which a very small man was trying to get his rather rotund wife out of a row boar. She had one foot in the boat and one on the peer and the boat was drifting away.

I got on the nose of the paddle boat as my brother maneuvered us as close as possible. I jumped, grabbed the peer with one hand and tried to get the other around her waist with the other just as she hit the water. We both went under but I kept my grip on the peer.

She unceremoniously used me like a ladder and climbed right up my back to get her top half on the peer. The husband grabbed her wrist (it took both hands to get around it) and tried to pull her up. Several other men arrived to finish the job.

From the water I watched her push the front half of her skirt down, leaving the back half up. Without a word to those of us who rescued her, marched down the peer toward shore–steam rising. The little man was hopping beside her, apologizing furiously but she would have none of it.

Otherwise, two seizers and two heart-attacks, one last Christmas.

Just doin’ my job, ma’am, but I am proud of…

Myself

10

Maybe.

It was a few years ago. I found myself in a city in upstate New York and got caught in a horrendous Ice Storm. 1" coating on all surfaces. Broken tree branches all over the city. Trees pulled down, power lines broken. Roads closed. The city shut down for three days. I was lucky I had the hotel room.

With nothing else to do, I walked to the house of a friend. Fortunately, he was within walking distance. He was, of course, very surprised to see me. I hadn’t even expected to be here, let alone stuck by the ice storm.

His electricity was out, too. But he’d gotten a generator. He was setting it up in his basement. This, I told him, was not a good idea. Carbon monoxide would build up and asphyxiate the whole family. We moved the generator out to the garage, leaving the exhaust out the window.

The next morning they all woke up with headaches. But at least they woke up. I hate to think what might have happened if I hadn’t blundered in.

11

On my 18th (I think) birthday, I went over to my brother’s place to pick him up. His down-and-out friend was living with him at the time, and was rather depressed this particular evening. He decided to take a serrated bread knife and carve both his wrists to the bone, right in front of my brother and I. (Gee, thanks for the birthday present, Marco. :rolleyes: ) Fortunately, I remembered my First Aid from the Boy Scouts, and was able stop the gushing blood until the ambulance arrived. According to the paramedics, he would have most likely died if I hadn’t.

========

A few years later, I was with my girlfriend on a very hot August day - it was about 2PM, sunny, and over 90 degrees. It was my friend’s wedding day, and we had some time to kill between the church ceremony and the reception. We stopped for some pizza, and ate it in the car outside the pizza place. It was so hot out that we sat there with the motor running and the A/C on. I had noticed that there was a big early-70s clunker of a car parked in front of us. We’re talking and eating pizza for at least 15 minutes, when all of a sudden I see a head pop up in the back seat of the car in front of us. It looked like a 3 year old girl, crying, and drenched in sweat.

I jumped out of my car and ran to the car the girl was in, but the windows were up and the doors were locked! I ran into the pizza place asking if anyone knew whose car that was. Excuse my terminology here, but this goddamned bitch stuffing her face with pizza pipes up and says it’s her car!!! I’m yelling at her with this feeling of disbelief, and she yells back telling me to mind my own business! Holy crap, I couldn’t believe a mother would do such a thing. I thought about smashing the window, but didn’t have anything (not even a tire iron in my car). I left, got in my car and drove about 2 blocks before I saw a police car, and explained the whole thing, and they took care of it. I don’t know if that girl would have died, but who knows how long her “mother” would have left her in there.

12

I’ve Heimliched three different people, two in restaurants and my ex-father-in-law right at the dinner table. It’s a bit of an adrenaline rush, but it wasn’t like I was a surgeon or anything.

On the other hand, I have three kids and I’ve almost killed each of them, so I guess it evens out, karma-wise.

13

Mine are weirdly similar to Space Vampire’s.

First one was while sledding in my parents’ yard with my brother. He was a little kid at the time; we were doubling up on the sled with him in front of me. We misjudged our trajectory and headed right for the hedges, which had some nice sharp eye-level-for-little-bro branches. I slapped my hand over his eyes and pulled him off the sled with me at just about the last second, we were going so fast. I don’t believe he could have been killed but the potential for blinding or severe injury to his face and eyes was definitely there. I’m sure he has no memory of this, except perhaps for being really pissed at me for knocking him into the snow!

The other one was a friend of mine who called me while I was at worked and claimed to be sitting at her desk, about to slash her wrists with scissors. She didn’t do it… but I’m not sure how much of her decision had to do with me. She said she was calling me so I’d distract her because she wanted to do it but knew she shouldn’t. Like she needed something to focus on until she could put the scissors away.

I have since been told that “you can’t really kill yourself with scissors,” but I figure if you’re determined enough you can do it with just about anything-- so while I don’t know if she truly intended to go through with it if I didn’t talk to her, I think she could have done some damage if she’d tried.

Dire Wolf, just read your post while I was previewing… that poor kid!

14

Yeah, but I don’t even remember the kid’s name. It was at the beach when I was younger (around 14) and this little kid (about 4 or 5) was playing in the ocean, going deeper and deeper into the water. His mom was too busy taking care of his little brother to notice. He finally got out too deep and the waves went over his head, and of course, he didn’t have on those little water-wing things.
Enter Nocturne. I walked out there, pulled him out of the water…he clung to me like a little tree frog. I took him back to his mother, un-glued him from my body, handed him over, and left the beach. His mom hadn’t even seen what had almost happened to him.

15

Yeah, sorry about that :p. In my defense, as soon as I hit “Submit” I realized I’d made a mistake.

A bunch of us were on a road trip in college when one of the women had an asthma attack. Severe asthma attack. Big time. I was the only one in the van who had any Primatine Mist®. They credited me with keeping the woman alive until we got her to the hospital.

16

What goes round comes round.

I extracted a person from a full submersion leg pin in pushy rapids, where another second or so would have been the end of her.

But on another occasion a fellow trawled me in from under a waterfall when I was seeing spots and on the verge of unconsciousness.

Nice to paddle with a good crew.

17

Well, possibly.

The summer I turned 14 I took care of a 5 year old and a 10 year old while their mom was at work. (She was a single mom and had to keep working nearly full time, even when they were out of school.) I occurs to me that anytime you spend that many hours taking care of a couple kids, something is bound to happen. One afternoon, while eating lunch, the older child got to giggling and inhaled a piece of her peanut butter sandwich. She stood up, tried to cough, but couldn’t make any sound. I did the Heimlich thing and out popped the bite of sandwich.

The following summer, I was at the beach when I noticed a toddler playing in the water. She had wandered out too far (or perhaps the tide was coming in.) In any case, the waves were breaking over her face and she was starting to splutter and nearly topple over. I ran over, grabbed her out of the water, and looked around for her parent(s). Her mom was reading a book. I was so horrified by this that I could only say “I think she swallowed some water” when I really wanted to scream at her for neglecting her child. Just telling this, I’m still pissed off.

Though it would likely only have ended in some sort of (possibly serious) injury, I also once grabbed a shopping cart and prevented it from toppling over when the toddler sitting in the child seat stood up and leaned out. His parents had their backs to him and didn’t see what he was doing. I just happened to be walking by and, fortunately, I have always paid attention to children, even before I had any of my own. I’m also the (at that time, childless) person who put out my hand to cushion a todler’s chin as he tripped and fell toward the cement edge of a patio. The other adults around me hadn’t even noticed until it was too late. I really don’t know how I did it; I just reacted before I even had time to formulate a conscious thought that he might be hurt. Now that I have kids of my own, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stuck out a steadying hand or cushioned a fall. It seems to be my job.

18

This woman was attempting to negotiate her invalid mother’s wheelchair off over the edge of a 1-2 foot high curb (no kidding!). The chair instantly scooted out of her grip when it touched the ground and her frail mother toppled over backwards and struck her head directly on the pavement.

The old woman was obviously distressed and in pain. I strode up and suddenly found myself in charge of the situation. I was amazed that such a large crowd was drawn to the scene and nobody offered to help. I immediately identified myself as someone trained in CPR and first aid and gave her daughter my business card.

I began to check the elderly woman’s vital signs people begin suggesting that she should be moved out of the roadway. As I put my finger on the woman’s carotid artery to take her pulse I found a neck collar instead. I had to explain to the gawkers who still wanted to move her that her pre-existing neck injury made that completely out of the question and that moving her could be fatal.

About that time the security guards finally showed up. I gave them my card, sent one of them to call 911 and get a blanket and walked off with my girlfriend who had witnessed the whole thing. The look of adulation in her eyes and the praise she gave me later :smiley: was one of the warmest feelings in my life.

(Many months later when the mall’s insurance company phoned me for my witness report, I was obliged to inform them that they were entirely at fault for leaving such a hazardous declevity available to pedestrian traffic. I mentioned that they should put up a barrier and settle immediately with the plaintiff. I never heard from them again so I’m sure they did.)
Many years ago at a party I had to peel this tripping acid head jerk off of a plate glass window that he was leaning against with all of his weight, “because the sunlight felt so good.”
Maybe these were only close calls, but I sure didn’t want to see what might have happened.

19

When I was a kid my neighbor was drowning in the deep end of the town pool. The lifeguard thought he was joking and did nothing. My brother jumped in and pulled the neighbor to safety. I would have considered this as saving his life, but as my brother was the one who actually pushed him into the pool n the first place, I’m not so sure.

20

I heimlich’d my kid when she was two and choking on a sucker. I was afraid I’d broke her rib for a few minutes, too, due to the screaming that ensued. Turns out she was just happy to breathe again.

Lyllyan, I hope never to be as dumb and/or unprepared (as a parent) as the two in your story.