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Kevin Stephan always wanted to find the right way to thank the off-duty nurse who got his 11-year-old heart beating again after a baseball bat struck him in the chest in 1999.
Nine days ago, the now-17-year-old Kevin found the perfect way to thank Penny Brown.
He returned the life-saving favor, rushing out of a Depew restaurant kitchen to administer the Heimlich maneuver as Brown choked on her lunch.
In a sense, Brown saved Kevin's life - so he could help save hers.
Initially, he didn't even know the woman he helped on the afternoon of Jan. 27 was the nurse who saved his life on a baseball diamond 61/2 years earlier.
Kevin's mother - who happened to be in the restaurant that afternoon - was the first to realize the link between the two events.
"Oh, my goodness," Lorraine Stephan told Brown. "You saved my son's life seven years ago, and now he's saved yours."
It's a pair of incidents that, by comparison, would make a pair of lightning strikes in the same spot seem highly probable. And a pair of events that would be described as too hokey, if you saw it on a TV show.
"Wow. I couldn't believe it," said Kevin, now a senior at Lancaster High School. "Everyone I have told is like, "No way.' They're in total disbelief."
While neither Kevin nor Brown sought publicity for their actions, they both wanted to emphasize the need for people to be prepared - to learn CPR, the Heimlich maneuver and other life-saving techniques.
"This is the essence of what we're about and what we do," said Nancy M. Blaschak, executive director of the local chapter of the American Red Cross. "We teach people to save people's lives, and that's happened."
Blaschak said the Red Cross would love to see one person in each household learn such life-saving measures.
http://buffalonews.com/editorial/20060205/1054419.asp
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