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.”
- 30 -
News for
the week of
March 13
– March 18
