Kaylee Rivera

Senior kinesiology major Kaylee Rivera was working as the manager of a local Dollar General when she had an experience that changed her life and the life of the child that she saved with CPR.

“I was working that night with a cashier,” said Rivera. “I was outside getting the buggies, and a car was honking.”

Rivera thought the noise came from children playing around in the parking lot, but soon realized otherwise.

“There was a car parked on the side of the building, and I heard a little girl calling for me,” said Rivera. “She was sticking her head out of the front passenger side of the car. I walked over there, and in my peripheral vision, I saw a little girl sticking her head out of the back window.”

She described what she heard as she walked up the girl:  “Help, help, please come here, help.”

Rivera explains, “When I went over there, the girl was in tears and she said ‘Can you please help? My little sister, her head is stuck in the window,’ and that’s when I turned and saw her little sister. Her head was shaking, her eyes were rolling to the back of her head, and drool was coming out.”

Rivera states that the older sister looked to be around 4-years-old. The little girl with her head stuck seemed to be around two.

“I started banging on the side of the window,” said Rivera. “I was trying to break it, and it didn’t work. I tried to push down the button from the passenger side of the window, but the 4-year-old said, ‘No, it doesn’t work. The window doesn’t work.’”

At this point, Rivera was yelling at her cashier to call 911 and went inside to find something to break the window. She grabbed an umbrella, but when she came back, the little girl had been freed from the window.

 Rivera explained that at this point, the mother was holding her child.

“She was holding her, and the little girl was limp, and she was saying, ‘No, my baby, my baby. Wake up,’” said Rivera.

The mother laid the 2-year-old on the ground and Rivera began performing CPR.

“After about the second or third set, the baby gasped, woke up and just laid there crying,” said Rivera. “She was just looking up at the sky, crying.”

Rivera had only recently learned how to perform CPR from Health Studies 131, Emergency Health Care, a course she had taken with instructor of kinesiology and health studies Bing Athey.

“There are two kinds of CPR,” said Athey. “A lot of times when something happens and people call 911, the 911 dispatcher will tell them to do hands on only. In our class, we are teaching what we call ‘High Quality CPR,’ which is compression with breathing.”

The CPR technique, like taught in Athey’s class, is 30 compressions to two breaths.

“In Kaylee’s case, thank God she gave breaths because the child was basically unconscious because she had no oxygen,” said Athey. “It’s very important for a trained person to give oxygen to the child while doing CPR. For adults, a lot of the time they go into cardiac arrest because of a heart condition, but for children a lot of the time it is breathing related.”

Rivera shares her appreciation for Athey’s impartment of knowledge upon her.

“I saw her in the hallway after and I stopped her and I thanked her,” said Rivera.

Athey believes that CPR is a vital skill.

“I tell them that I pray that you never have to use it,” said Athey. “Every semester, you wouldn’t believe that I have students come to me saying they saved a person.I think anybody can take this class, and you just can’t go wrong by learning the lifesaving skills."