It’s a nerve-wracking truth for some people and an attractive thought for others, but it’s surprisingly easy for a regular person to suddenly become a hero.
And we can find confirmation for this reality in stories where people thought quickly when someone was in distress on the highway or happened to be in the right place at the right time when someone was drowning .
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But as incredible as these stories are, they tend to make it easy to forget that the majority of life-threatening emergencies happen at home .
That’s something they’ll tell you at any CPR class, but it recently became frighteningly relevant for one woman.
In a video uploaded to TikTok on December 27, a woman named Lizzy shared a story that started with her celebrating Christmas with her girlfriend’s family.
And while she thought the steak they had together was delicious, it seemed that the girlfriend’s grandmother — whose name is Dana — put something of a damper on the festivities by asking Lizzy if she was “the boy.”
But an hour after this awkward question about their relationship, there was suddenly no time to worry about that because Dana had started choking and turning blue.
And while Dana’s oldest and strongest grandson initially tried to give her the heimlich maneuver, it soon became clear to Lizzy that he didn’t know what he was doing.
So since she’s CPR certified, she took over. And after about eight abdominal thrusts, Dana’s situation became even more perilous when she fell unconscious in Lizzy’s arms.
At this point, Lizzy started chest compressions while singing the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive” to get the tempo right after yelling for one of Dana’s relatives to call 911.
This incident took place over the course of five minutes, but Lizzy said it felt like forever.
But as she describes in the full video available here, Dana suddenly exhaled at one point and after a couple of additional compressions, the wayward piece of steak appeared in her mouth.
After the girlfriend’s dad removed it, Dana started breathing again and Lizzy was instantly ecstatic.
As she put it, “I felt like I won the Super Bowl! And I never want to do that again!”
And since Lizzy’s followers were curious about the aftermath of that incident, she made a follow-up video.
And in it, we learned that although the CPR broke every single one of Dana’s ribs, she was going to be OK.
And in Lizzy’s words, “She actually didn’t know I was the one who did it until my girlfriend told her.”
But once Dana did find this out, she said Lizzy had done a good job because while her ribs were broken, they were broken in roughly the same place.
And of course, the fact that she was successful at all didn’t hurt either.
