It’s one thing to be in the right place at the right time to help someone, but would you know exactly what to do if a life was on the line? A Dining Services cashier and student employee recently confronted that scenario.
On the night before the Easter break, cashier Delores Joyce was working in the nearly empty Stuart Hall dining room when a student told her that someone appeared to be choking. Joyce radioed the Dining Service managers and hurried to the scene.
“[The student] was sitting at a table and he had a lot of mucus coming out of his mouth,” recalled Joyce, a five-year veteran of BCDS from Galway, Ireland. “I just pulled him up out of his seat and started to do the Heimlich maneuver. He had been choking for a couple of minutes.”
But the student was considerably bigger and taller than Joyce, making it difficult to continue the life-saving procedure. That’s when student employee Quinlan Taylor took over.
“I pulled up on him pretty good because he was a bigger kid,” said Taylor, a biochemistry major from Woodstock, Conn., who learned the Heimlich from high school health courses and his grandmother, a nurse. “He was choking on steak – I served him his burrito 10 minutes before he was choking on it, so I knew every ingredient in his meal.”
Taylor knew time was of the essence, given how the victim’s labored breathing was getting weaker. “He could get a little bit of air out but he was bent over and pale, with a hand on the table trying to cough. He was obviously scared. It took nine or 10 pulls to get him to breathe.”
Taylor was able to free the airway, and an ambulance soon arrived to take the student to the hospital, where he was checked out and sent home.
After the Easter break, the victim found Joyce and Taylor in the dining hall to say thank you – several times.
“He was very thankful,” said Joyce. “I just said I was glad he was doing well. You could tell he was embarrassed over it.”
The happy ending is testament to the emergency preparation employees in BCDS and Auxiliary Services undergo: There are 195 employees certified in choking assistance and 95 employees who are certified in CPR.
“The training provides our team with the skills they need to know in order to increase a person’s survival until medical support arrives,” said Beth Ann Burns, human resources manager for Auxiliary/Dining Services. “Our staff, as food service professionals, needs to know the critical skills that are vital to responding to an emergency situation that could happen in any of our many dining operations throughout the campus.”
Neither Taylor nor Joyce want to make too much of what they did.
“I never thought I’d need to do the Heimlich,” said Joyce, “but I’ve been a mother of three children so I know that things do happen.”
“I’m glad I was there and I’m glad nothing worse happened,” says Taylor. “But I think most people would do the same thing.”
By Sean Hennessey | News & Public Affairs