You know a friend is a keeper when they didn’t hesitate to save your life.
A student from Utah gets to enjoy another chicken sandwich and the rest of his life all thanks to his friend.
It was lunchtime in West Jordan Middle School when a group of friends was enjoying their lunch. As caught on the cafeteria’s cameras, one of them, Jackson Johnson, suddenly clutched his throat. When the bite of his chicken sandwich failed to dislodge, he quickly stood up and walked to the nearby trashcan.
“I was really terrified,” Johnson said, as quoted by FOX News. “My immediate reaction was to see if I could cough it up into the trash can.”
As he was hunched and gagging over the trash bin, two of his friends giggled and laughed.
At first, they thought Johnson was just fooling around as all younger students do. They even laughed at him when they thought he was being funny.
But when his color started to change, and he placed his hands to signal that he was choking, his friends immediately sprang into action.
“Then he did the sign and his face was a different color and his eyes looked scared, so I did the Heimlich,” said Hunter Olsen, one of his friends, shared with the news outlet.
Olsen shared that he learned the Heimlich maneuver in eighth-grade health class. While most people think that younger students don’t even pay attention in the classroom, Olsen just disproved that stereotype.
He admitted that he “kind of knew exactly” what to do but he also never thought he would need to use it.
When the gravity of the situation became clear he said that something in his brain just “clicked” and prompted him to do first aid without hesitation.
The entire ordeal would’ve ended up in tragedy if not for his actions, but there’s also one person the teens are thankful for.
As seen in the video, when Olsen successfully dislodged the blockage using the Heimlich, he extended his hands out in celebration and screamed out “Miss Howa!”
As Kathy Howa, their teacher, shared with Humankind how glad she was to know that the kids were actually listening and that it resulted in a life being saved.
As their health teacher, Howa guides her students through first aid and CPR.
These are vital skills that all of us need to learn so we’d be prepared when events like these do happen.
Olsen also praised Howa’s teaching skills as it was clear and easy to learn. He even admitted that he didn’t pay attention as much as he’d hoped but at that moment, he knew exactly what to do and how to execute it.
Howa conceded though that learning about the maneuver is the easy part because it becomes much more intense when you find yourself in a situation where you actually had to use it.
So when she saw the video of how Olsen saved Johnson, she was just so impressed at the boy’s calmness and awareness.
As for Olsen, though, the event echoes a motto he lives by: It’s better to do something than to do nothing. At that moment, he did and he saved his friend’s life because of it.
Watch the video below to see how this quick-thinking teen saved his friend’s life by using a technique he learned in health class!
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