How to Save a Life
If fate hadn’t intervened, Jonathan Boudreaux would be working overseas today, and an incident at the Five Trails Rotary Club in Casper, Wyoming, might have gone very differently.
Boudreaux was working in Casper for an oil company and was about to be transferred overseas when his wife told him she wanted to put roots down in Casper. “That’s when I got a job at Black Hills Energy,” said Boudreaux, gas operations manager for Central Wyoming.
He joined the Five Trails Rotary Club soon after and within a few months was named the club’s president-elect. “I wanted to be involved in the community,” said Boudreaux.
Just before Thanksgiving a year ago, he was running late to the club’s monthly meeting and sat at a table near the back of the room. As the group was enjoying lunch, suddenly, the woman sitting next to Boudreaux began to cough. She couldn’t stop. As he looked over, “I realized she was choking.”
Another member quickly tried to perform the Heimlich maneuver but wasn’t tall enough to have the right leverage. So, Boudreaux, who’s 6-feet, 3-inches, stepped up. “We do first responder training, basic first aid and the Heimlich, yearly at Black Hills Energy,” he said. But it was the first time, besides bandaging up his kids’ cuts and scrapes, that he’d had to use what he’d learned.
“I got up and asked if she was ready, she nodded her head, and just as hard as I could, I did it and got it out,” said Boudreaux. “It was surreal, like a movie. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
In the meantime, first responders arrived, who took the woman in to check her lungs and airway—but not before she gave Boudreaux a huge hug and expressed her thanks to him for saving her life. Members were thankful too—so much so that one, a city clerk, nominated Boudreaux for the Casper Police Department Life-Saving Award, which he was awarded a few months later.
But that’s not the end of the story. “What was interesting to me after it happened was that it really hit me how many people froze, not knowing what to do,” he said. So Boudreaux arranged for the Casper Fire Department to present first aid training at the club’s next meeting—“to get everyone understanding what they should be doing when these situations come up.”
He added, “I hope I never have to do it again because it was terrifying…But I’m a big believer that everything happens for a reason, and I was sitting next to her because I was able to help the situation. I’m sure glad I had that training, and I would strongly argue that everyone should have first aid training, because you just never know.”