On March 29th, Ryan Roberts, a 45-year-old ceramics teacher at the Iolani School in Honolulu was headed home from work with his two sons in the car when he spotted a car parked in the middle of the road. Next to the car was an older woman who Roberts says looked panicked and was in danger. He pulled over and ran toward the car to try and help and soon realized there was the woman and her 100-year-old mother, who was choking and gasping for air.
Roberts, who had recently been through retraining for CPR, knew exactly what to do, spun the woman around and performed the Heimlich maneuver on her. At first, he tried to be gentle, afraid he might injure the elderly woman, but when the first attempt didn’t work, he tried a second time a little harder. On his third attempt, the woman coughed up the throat lozenge that she’d been choking on and started to breathe again.
At that moment, an off-duty EMS pulled up on the scene and Robert, satisfied that the woman would be well taken care of, went on his way. But because Roberts was wearing a school t-shirt, the woman’s doctor was able to track him down to give him the praise he deserves. According to Roberts’ boss, this isn’t the first time that the teacher has saved a life, it’s actually his fifth. Like the hero he is, Roberts is taking his moment in the limelight to remind people how important it is to get trained in CPR so you can “become a resource to your community."
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