Man goes into cardiac arrest after a normal workday, but stepson ends up saving his life with a health class lesson
No one ever knows when the lessons about health and safety come in handy. People can end up saving someone's life just because of a health and safety class they took. A 15-year-old, Anthony Killinger, experienced something similar when he performed CPR on his stepdad, Michael Reese, during a medical emergency. Killinger had learned to perform the procedure in his health class and ended up saving Reese's life because of that, per Good Morning America. "He was heroic," Reese said.
"For someone of his age to step up and act in such a fashion when there's a medical emergency, that's a hard thing to do and he took it upon himself and stepped up. And luckily, I'm here today because of him," Reese said about his stepson. Reese had wrapped up after a normal work day as a law enforcement officer. Nothing unusual had happened throughout the day as far as he could remember. "I went to work. Did work after at the house, did my normal [routine] -- watch[ed] the evening news and relaxed. And usually, I go up to bed sometime around midnight and I don't recall anything," the stepfather recalled. However, the mom, Jennifer Killinger-Reese and son had a different account of the events after Reese went to bed.
The family's two dogs, Bronx and Finley, had started barking very loudly, drawing the mother and son's attention. "My mom runs down the stairs because the dogs were barking really loud and really late at night and that never happens… [She] runs right back up, tells me, 'Mike might be dead. Call 911,'" the son explained. They got on a call with a dispatcher from the emergency services, who told them to start CPR immediately. "The dispatcher asked if there was a pulse. Anthony, he actually checked for a pulse. It was faint, but he had a pulse. So then me and him were instructed to start giving CPR. I had to do the counting. And … I don't know CPR. He knew it, so he did it," the mom recounted.
Killinger had learned how to do CPR during his health class in high school. He remembered that he performed the procedure on Reese for around eight minutes before the ambulance arrived to take him to the hospital. Reese had gone into cardiac arrest, as per the doctors at Buffalo General Medical Center, part of Kaleida Health, in Buffalo, New York. "My short-term memory, because of a lack of oxygen, was pretty much diminished and still, until today, last I remember was waking up in the hospital and being advised as to what had transpired." Kaleida Health's Facebook post called his recovery a miracle and listed out the chain reaction of events that allowed the doctors to save his life.
"His care team were just angels from God. They were the reason I slept at night," Killinger-Reese expressed. Reese was welcomed by colleagues and friends as he left the hospital after six days of the incident. "The doctor said, with his condition, in the cardiac arrest, he had a 9% chance of living. And it's because of the work that Anthony did before the paramedics arrived that he is still living. They said it was truly a miracle. And then even within that 9%, there's a small percent chance that he would come off having no brain damage," the mom told the outlet. The stepdad expressed, "I'm grateful to be here. I'm still in some pain, but besides that, it's a true blessing that I'm here and I'm very fortunate for Anthony." On the other hand, Killinger encouraged everyone to learn CPR as it might help them, like it helped him.