Hero’s 13-year-old CPR lesson good in the clutch
Published: March 31, 2006
After he and the father hugged and cried, Police Officer Edgar Louis-Juste said he did not even know the name of the year-old baby he had saved from choking.
“Nicholas,” the father said.
Louis-Juste had started his tour yesterday writing summonses and now he stood in the emergency room at Weill Cornell Medical Center, using a ballpoint pen to neatly letter “Nicholas” on the palm of his left hand. He then stepped into the sunshine with some advice for everyone in this city.
“Learn CPR,” he said.
By that he meant also to learn what to do if a baby is choking, as Nicholas was yesterday morning after his nanny gave him a piece of orange. The nanny apparently did not know what to do and she dashed from the apartment with the baby. She was running with him in her arms when she was struck by a van.
The thud brought beat cop Louis-Juste running over. Hehad trained in emergency first aid in theMarines and then in the Police Academy 13 years ago. He was surprised by how quickly that training came back to him as he climbed into an SUV with the limp, blue baby.
“It comes back to you,” he said. “It never leaves you.”
He did have a few terrible moments when he wondered ifhe really did remember what to do as he lay the baby facedown on his forearm at a downward angle and tapped on histiny back.
“I wasn’t sure if I was doing it correctly or not,” he recalled.
Then came the perfect moment when the baby spat up thebit of orange he was choking on. A few hours of training more than a decade ago proved to have value beyond measure as helistened to the baby begin breathing again.
“All of a sudden, I heard huh-huh-huh-huh,” Louis-Juste said.
The baby’s color returned and he blinked his eyes, a tiny new life that likely would have ended almost before it began if Louis-Juste were like too many people in this city who have no idea how to respond in such an emergency.
Louis-Juste did not even want to think of how he would have felt if the baby had died in his lap on that endless two-minute race to the hospital.
“Having kids myself, I would have wanted to die,” he said. “I don’t think I could handle that.”
Little Nicholas arrived at the hospital alive.
“I definitely made the right decision becoming a cop,” Louis-Juste said.
A native of Haiti who came here when he was 10 and graduated from Grady High School, Louis-Juste had served in the Marines and was now the latest of a long line of cops to apply their first-aid training with wonderful results. The apparent recordholder for saving babies seems to be city Police Officer George Scharnikow, who resuscitated three infants in a seven-year period between 1931 and 1938.
“Aw, it’s nothing to make a fuss about,” Scharnikow was quoted saying after the third save.
Yesterday, the media made a big fuss over Louis-Juste. He was asked to recount the story at least four times and on occasion he marveled at little Nicholas’ resilience.
“He’s a strong little boy,” Louis-Juste said. “They should call the kid Hercules.”
Louis-Juste said more than four times that everybody should learn CPR, for even a baby as strong as Nicholas might very well not have survived had there been nobody on the scene who knew what to do.
The Red Cross and the American Heart Association are just two of the organizations that offer CPR classes to New Yorkers.
The value of such training persists for years, as Louis-Juste reported yesterday while standing in the sunshine with “Nicholas” written on his hand. An emergency room nurse came over.
“A good save,” the nurse said.
The early reports indicated that the baby was fine, but as night fell, word came that little Nicholas was listed in critical condition. The hospital was not saying if this was the result of the choking or of injuries he may have suffered in the encounter with the van.
What was certain was Nicholas would very likely not even have a fighting chance were it not for a cop who tells us all to learn CPR.
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