feature stories
‘Thank you for saving my life’
Jun 5, 2008 11:13 AM
10-year-old grateful for chapter leader’s quick action
Chapter Leader Jack Meaney was in the right place at the right time to help 10-year-old Geann Stephen.
“I was afraid I was going to die,” said 10-year-old Geann Stephen, a 4th-grader at CS 61 in the Bronx.
It would have only taken a few more minutes before her fear was realized. The school cafeteria, which only a second before had been a familiar scene of classmates eating with their friends, was now the background of a terrifying nightmare.
Geann was choking on a piece of apple. It had lodged in her throat, completely blocking her trachea. She stood up, terrified, unable to take in a single breath of air, unable to even gasp — until a pair of firm, practiced, grown-up hands reached around from behind her and exerted upward pressure on her abdomen, two times, forcefully. Suddenly, the piece of fruit, which had taken on an aspect far more frightening than the poison apple in “Sleeping Beauty,” flew out of her throat like magic.
Still the child was terrified, crying hysterically. Chapter Leader Jack Meaney, who had performed the Heimlich Maneuver, kept his hands in position, listening, ready to exert pressure again, until he realized all that crying was a beautiful sound.
“I heard, in those gasps, the sound of breathing,” he said.
Meaney, a chapter leader for 18 of his 25 years as a special education teacher, was on lunch duty that day. “Talk about being in the right place at the right time,” he said.
“I’m usually outside in the schoolyard and it started to rain. So I came in to organize the transition of kids coming indoors, talking with an AP, and suddenly a girl pulls me on the sleeve and says, ‘Geann can’t breathe.’ I turn around and see — a little girl is not breathing. The look on her face!
“I had just finished taking my updates on CPR, defibrillator and First Aid about two weeks ago,” he said. “So without thinking, except for hoping I wasn’t going to break a rib, I did the Heimlich Manuever twice.”
Meaney did have the presence of mind, however, to send two girls to get the school nurse just as he began applying the maneuver.
“By the time the nurse came I already coughed up the apple,” Geann told the New York Teacher. “I was scared, I tried to talk but couldn’t, this was the first time this ever happened to me and I said in my head I’m afraid I’m going to die. I stand up and after I stand up I felt something stuck in my windpipe.
“I was talking to my friends when it happened,” she said. “My mom, after that happened, she was worried about me, and said never to talk with your mouth full. That was the lesson.”
And after it all happened there was a sweet lesson in store for Meaney: that a child he didn’t previously know — Geann was not his student — was about to be his new best little friend for life.
After all, he said, he did what anyone would have done in that situation, thought nothing of it and went on with his school day. So he was surprised when Geann came up to him in the hall later that day and asked if he’d gotten the card she gave to the principal for him. He hadn’t and went to the office of Patricia Quigley, who was re-reading the card as he came in the door.
“I’ve been looking for you to give you this,” Quigley said, “I guess you just saved somebody’s life.”
“I guess I did,” Meaney said, the idea beginning to dawn on him.
Meaney describes the card as “a pretty dramatic picture” of him standing behind a crying Geann with his hands on her stomach. Near the hands it says, “two times.” On the back is written. “Dear Mr. Meaney, Thank you for saving my life.”
“I will cherish that card forever,” Meaney says.
And it seems like a grateful little girl plans on cherishing her hero forever.
“Whenever she sees me in the hall I get a hug,” he said.
