A Cape Breton teen is being hailed a hero after his quick-thinking saved a woman from choking.
Alexander MacRae recently started working as a part-time server at the Three Doors Down Diner in Baddeck, N.S. He was working the lunchtime shift when a customer started choking on a piece of ham from her Western sandwich.
“Her husband, it was kind of strange, he just stood up and said ‘She’s choking!’” recalls MacRae. “That’s when I found out no one at Three Doors Down Diner is actually certified in First Aid, aside from me.”
Remembering a live-saving skill he learned at school last year, the 16-year-old quickly sprang into action.
“I started with back blows, so I gave her five back blows. Then I had to give her abdominal thrusts because the ham still didn’t come up,” explains MacRae. “I gave her five abdominal thrusts then went back to back blows and that still didn’t work, so I went back to abdominal thrusts. When I was just about done that round of abdominal thrusts, the ham came out.”
MacRae learned the procedure during a course at Baddeck Academy called Options and Opportunities. He says he never imagined he would have to put his training to use in a real-life emergency, and that things might have turned out differently if he hadn’t taken the course.
“I thought it was going to be really overwhelming, like scary, when we were learning it in First Aid, but really, it wasn’t,” he says. “It’s like your mind goes into this certain mode and you’re like ‘Hey, this has to be done.’”
“So often students say, ‘Why do I need to know that or learn that?’ But with Options and Opportunities, this is real life,” says Baddeck Academy Principal Barbara MacDonald. “So Alexander certainly took part in a real life episode and did a wonderful job and we are very proud of him.”
Word of the incident has travelled throughout the school, where MacRae is being hailed a hero, although he hesitates to use that term.
“I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. Stuff happens, right?”
Meanwhile, he says there is another lesson to be learned from the incident.
“Every workplace should have at least one person on staff that’s certified in First Aid because I think about what would have happened if I wasn’t there that day.”
With files from CTV Atlantic's Ryan MacDonald
