by Kirsten Brown

One September evening last fall, third-year student Nathan Lott sat down to say grace over dinner at the Mandarin Buffet in Twinsburg. He expected to enjoy an uneventful, quick meal; he never dreamed his actions within the next minutes would earn him a Red Cross Acts of Courage Award.

No sooner had he had finished praying, than Lott heard someone call out for medical assistance.

“I had just picked my head up and was about to dig into my plate of food, when a woman came into the room,” he says. “She asked for a doctor or a nurse or some other kind of medical personnel. I introduced myself, and she asked me to follow her.”

Lott followed her to the other side of the restaurant, where he observed another woman holding a man up in his chair. Lott checked for his pulse and, finding none, put him on the floor and began chest compressions.

“I just thought back to my BLS (Basic Life Support) classes,” Lott said, “I was thinking, ‘what do I have to do?’ Compressions, compressions, breathe, compressions, compressions was all I was thinking about. I didn’t have time to think about much else; it was just what do I need to do to save this man’s life?”

“The class that I took the July before I left,” he said, “in which you are taught what to do in case a person collapses unconscious — what to do as far as CPR or the Heimlich maneuver came to mind.”

As he continued to act, the training he received in the basic CPR training course as well as the advanced cardiac life support class fell into place, he said.

He was administering compressions as Twinsburg Fire Department paramedics arrived and prepared to give oxygen to the unconscious man.

“They hooked him up to leads to check for any electrical activity,” Lott says. “Then they started going through advanced cardiac life support treatment. But all that time, I kept doing chest compressions until I switched places with one of the paramedics. Then I held the bag of fluid that they were giving him.”

As the man was loaded the ambulance, one of the paramedics updated Lott on his condition.

“He told me that they had detected a heartbeat, so he had a pulse, and he was breathing,” Lott says. “They were taking him to a hospital in the Cleveland area.”

Lott learned a few weeks later that the man had lived, but heard no more of the event until a phone call in the middle of January. The Twinsburg Fire Department had nominated him for the Acts of Courage Award, given annually by the American Red Cross. According to the paramedics, Lott’s actions contributed to saving the man’s life. The caller informed him that the award would be presented to him at a March 7 ceremony.

“I wasn’t expecting it,” Lott says. “It came as a little bit of a shock, but it was a pleasant surprise. But I was just doing what I was trained to do.”

Lott’s heroism hardly shocked South Pointe CORE Administrator Michele Kairis.

“I was not surprised that Nathan dived right in and handled the emergency so well,” Kairis says. “As a third-year medical student, he has not only the skill, but the talent and expertise to know what to do.”

Lott’s colleagues at South Pointe are very happy for him, Kairis says.

“When I think of Nathan,” she says, “I cannot help but think of what a humble person he is, especially in this particular situation. When he told me about this, he almost seemed embarrassed over it. He was trying to make it seem as though it was not a big deal and that he was just at the right place at the right time. He was very humble.”

Lott and 14 others were honored March 7 at the Acts of Courage Awards Ceremony for having acted “courageously or with nobility of purpose … to reach out and help others in their times of greatest need, and by such action have embodied the ideals, principles, and purpose of the American Red Cross,” says the Red Cross.

The March 7 event doubled as a fundraiser and promoted the mission of the Red Cross, in addition to celebrating Lott and the other honorees, says Jackie Zavodney, Red Cross communications specialist.

Roughly 500 people attended the ceremony, which was hosted at the Tangiers building in Akron. This is the tenth year of the ceremony, Zavodney says.

“It is one of the premier award ceremonies in Summit County,” she says.

“We are one of the only organizations honoring people who risk their lives to save a life — people who run into burning buildings and other people, like Nathan, who have the medical skills and use them to save a life.”

But the award ceremony pales in comparison to the lessons Lott has learned from the experience of saving a man’s life.

“It just brings into clarity that things do just happen,” Lott says, “and if you’re not prepared, bad things can come of it. But as long as you diligently prepare and do the things you know you’re supposed to do, you won’t be too surprised by unexpected turns of events.”

And this unexpected turn also solidified Lott’s faith.

“It’s a blessing from God, I’m telling you,” Lott says. “I’d been debating whether I was going to go out to eat and, just on a whim, decided to go to that restaurant. Everything happens for a reason.”