A middle school student in North Carolina kept her cool and used the skills her dad taught her when her teacher started choking in class.Zoe McLain was sitting in Ms. Manuel’s class at Edgecombe Middle School in Rocky Mount when her instructor began choking on the grapes she was eating.
The eighth grader says the students didn’t realize anything was wrong until Ms. Manuel started banging on the table and got on her knees, and that’s when some of the class rushed over to help. Some kids banged on her back to try to free the food, but it didn’t work. Finally, Zoe stepped up and tried the Heimlich maneuver, something her dad taught her years before. And it worked! The grape was dislodged and the teacher could breathe again.
Ms. Manuel thanked her student right then and again in a handwritten note and Zoe says she’s just happy she was able to use her training to help save her. The teen’s dad,Steve McLain is also incredibly proud of his daughter’s heroics. “We always tried to teach her, in any given situation, calmness prevails,” he explains. And it seems she was paying attention.