Grants Pass, Ore.– “A doctor said, ‘You died,’ and I was like, ‘I what?’ and he said, ‘You died and your son resuscitated you.'”
It took many sets of hands to help Katie Parker stand alive and well, but it was a specially trained pair that saved her life.
“You are awesome,” Katie says to her 15-year-old son David. “You know what, because you are you, I am still here. I am very, very fortunate.”
David Parker used a lesson he learned at school to keep his mother alive when she suffered cardiac arrest in December.
“I learned how to use a defibrillator,” says David. “And i learned how to do CPR.”
That one time class never left David’s mind.
“They let me take a dummy and take it home to teach the family,” David recalls.
Little did his parents know, David was practicing the life saving skill weekly, just in case of an emergency.
“He never announced it to anybody,” says Charley, David’s father.
Katie, his mother explains, “David has autism and one of the things that is quirky about David and just who he is, is that he practices things. If he learns a skill he will do it over and over until it’s perfected.”
It was that constant practice that helped David master proper CPR technique. He was able to keep his mother stable until help could arrive. That’s something emergency officials say is out of the ordinary.
“Normally we do not have [people do] effective CP,” says Lt. Vinny Ownbey of Grants Pass Fire and Rescue.
“He was doing it absolutely perfectly,” explains Amanda Main, a dispatcher for Grants Pass Public Safety. She answered the Parker kid’s call the night their mom collapsed unconscious.
“We talk to people when they are at their worst and when they are having their hardest moments,” Main says. “To have her [Katie] hug me and to know that she was able to spend Christmas with her family, yeah it was a little more of a tear jerker that I thought it was going to be.”
While Katie is forever grateful for her son, “David, I will always be proud of you.”
David says he won’t take the credit for saving his mom’s life.
“During the chest compressions, I asked God to help me perform them well. So if anyone, He deserves the recognition.”
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