Hero teen saves heart attack victim
Hero teen saves heart attack victim
By JENNY YUEN, QMI Agency
TORONTO - The difference between life and death for a man in his 70s was in the hands of a teenage girl.
Hailey Knight, 16, was returning home from her job at Yellow Dog Music School Thursday around 8 p.m. when she and a friend entered St. Clair subway station.
She noticed a man collapsed on the southbound platform and his face had turned blue. She quickly realized he was in cardiac arrest and her years of CPR training were vital in saving him.
“He had a pulse, but then it stopped, so I started doing CPR on him for five minutes,” Knight, a Grade 11 student at Rosedale Heights School of the Arts, said Friday.
“He had clearly had a heart attack, because he had the death rattle and I knew about it because my dad’s friend had a heart attack. I didn’t really think about it — it’s something that you just do.”
Knight yelled for spectators to call 911 and for another person to get a defibrillator near the collector’s booth in the station.
“I was disturbed that no one was calling 911,” she said.
“I actually called my brother and handed it to the guy beside me and told him to keep calling it because my brother is a nurse. I wanted to start the defibrillator, but didn’t know how.”
When medics and fire crews arrived, she thought he was dead. Doctors later told her that the man, who was identified to her as 73-year-old Lawrence Freedman, was dead, but her CPR had brought him back to life. He is on life support at Toronto General Hospital.
“I visited him earlier this morning,” Knight said. “We’re really hoping he’s going to come out of it. (His family) said they were very thankful. I worked really hard to get him back, but it was scary because you can never be sure (he’s going to be alive), so I just did all I could.”
Knight first learned CPR when she started swimming in her early teens and brushed up later when she entered Grade 9.
Saving lives runs in the family, her father, Peter, said on the phone from his Cobourg home.
It was three years ago when Peter, 45, and his son, Jak, saved a man suffering from cardiac arrest in a karate class.
“That fella’s name is Richard Grant. He used to work at GM, but now he works in Korea and is having a nice life, which he obviously wouldn’t have if he died that day,” he said.
“When you give CPR, your odds of saving a person is about 4%, most other people die. She’s really a hero.”
Jak, 20, was interested in video game design at the time, but since the CPR incident has switched his career path to medicine and recently graduated from Loyalist College’s nursing program.
Knight doesn’t consider herself a hero, just a person who was willing to help when it was called for.
“Helping out makes you feel better,” she said. “By helping people, eventually you get help in return. I think CPR should be part of the curriculum at school because it’s so helpful that I knew it. If I hadn’t, I would’ve done something wrong.”
jenny.yuen@sunmedia.ca