'She didn't miss a beat': How this Somerset cafeteria worker saved a student's life
SOMERSET — Joan Plummer doesn’t want to be viewed as a superhero. From her perspective, she just did her job.
A recess and lunch supervisor at the North Elementary School, Plummer was on cafeteria duty on Jan. 6 when a student alerted her that another student was in distress. Plummer saw a fourth-grade boy seated at a table, with his hand on his throat. She realized the student was choking.
Plummer, 72, went to the table. She applied the Heimlich maneuver. The obstruction was a piece of raw carrot. Interestingly, Plummer noted, when she applied the Heimlich, the carrot wasn’t ejected; the student swallowed it.
Dr. Paula Manchester, the North Elementary principal, viewed Plummer’s rescue on a school video recording and said her employee was cool and quick under pressure and then, without fanfare, returned to her routine cafeteria duties.
The boy was fine.
“She immediately responded. She didn’t even hesitate,” Manchester said. “She kept talking to the student. She didn’t miss a beat. It didn’t even faze her. He was fine within seconds. It was like part of her day.”
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How Plummer knew what to do in an emergency
As part of her employment with the school department, Plummer has received basic lifesaving skills training, three times, she believes, in her 21 years with the department.
This, she said, was the first time in her life she has used the Heimlich. “If I hadn’t had the training, I wouldn’t have known what to do.”
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She said thanks to the quick alert from the other student, the fourth-grade boy seemed to have just begun to struggle. She said he was seated and was not blue in the face.
The student was able to comply when she told him to stand. Almost instinctively, Plummer said, she took the position behind the student, reached around his torso, placed her fist in the right spot on his abdomen and pushed hard.
“It snaps. You snap into the mode,” she said. “It was very quick. We caught it right away. I knew what I had to do, and that was it.”
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Plummer recommends that all school department members get the lifesaving training.
Fourth-graders have the last lunch period. So, not long later, after a recess, Plummer was done for the day.
“I smiled all the way home,” she said. “I was so happy.”
She said she plans to keep working “until they tell me I’m too old. You get attached to these kids. It’s like they’re your grandchildren.”
This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Somerset cafeteria worker saves choking student's life with Heimlich
