Middle school girl saves choking teacher: 'I was like, I hope I’m doing this right'
A middle school student in North Carolina saved the day when her teacher began choking in class last week, NBC Charlotte reports.
Zoe McLain, an 8th grader at Edgecombe Middle School in Rocky Mount, N.C., was in class when her teacher, Ms. Manuel, began choking on the grapes she was eating.
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“We were sitting in class and she [the teacher] was eating grapes,” McLain said. “We didn’t think anything was wrong until she started banging on the table, and she got on her knees.”
Students rushed to the teacher’s aid and began smacking her on the back in an effort to dislodge the grapes, to no avail. That’s when McLain decided to try the Heimlich maneuver, which her dad had taught her years before.
“I was like, ‘I hope I’m doing this right. I hope I’m doing this right,'” the student told local news outlet WNCN.
After a couple of tries, Manuel recovered.
“She was like, ‘I can breathe again’. She was like, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ She was crying,” McLain told WNCN.
Her father, Steve McLain, couldn’t be prouder, telling WNCN that his daughter’s heroics have left him feeling “on top of the world.”
“We always tried to teach her, in any given situation, calmness prevails,” he added. “You want to see what’s going on and do the very best you can to help that person.”
His daughter, who received a handwritten letter of thanks from the teacher, is just happy she was able to rely on her training to help.
“You never know when you might need it,” McLain told NBC Charlotte. “I didn’t think I would use it, and it turns out I did because my teacher was choking on grapes in the middle of class.”
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