My son used to eat too fast without chewing properly.
He’d just swallow lumps of food sometimes, even though we’d actively work on slowing down.

He was a solid mass of a kid from his down syndrome, (he has the physique of a silverback)

He went wide eyed at dinner one night and wasn’t breathing, I had to get him out of the chair and spun around for a heimlich maneuver. Because he was choking he was going all limp, and I’d just finished cancer treatment so I was fatigued and weak AF, so it took everything I had to lift him and do the heimlich. He coughed out the food on the first or second try. Thankfully, because I was done after that exertion.

When I was in undergrad some of my friends and I were eating a late dinner in the dining hall when someone came in to say that someone had fallen in the river. It was the middle of winter at the time, so when we rushed out we saw that a man had fallen through the ice, perhaps while trying to cross, and was clinging to the edge of the hole while half submerged. He was pretty far out and we didn’t know how stable the ice was, so we tied our scarves together and bound them to a thick stick. I had to try a few times but eventually succeeded in throwing the weighted end to him and dragging him to the bank. Unfortunately the dude was really unpleasant and said something horribly racist to a black woman who was standing with us, apropos of nothing. We left immediately after ensuring that he was no longer in mortal peril, as it looked like news vehicles were starting to show up and we didn’t want any part of that.

About two years old child choking. Mother was running around him in circles.

Grabbed the child and placed him on my knee face down. Struck him twice between sholder plates. Was able to hook the object from his troat with my finger.

It was a large piece of hard candy.

Mother grabbed him and ran away still in panic.

My 18 month old son was having respiratory and stomach symptoms that seemed worse than a standard cold to me, but his doctors said not to worry, all kids have a bad cold sometimes. Even after apples came out exactly as they went in, points and all, and the top of his head had become sunken.

I insisted on taking him to hospital despite being told I was overreacting, and they admitted him immediately without even asking our name. His blood was thick like pudding, and it took a while before they could even do tests, because they couldn’t take blood.

It was rotavirus, and he was in intensive care for 2 weeks.
It was one of the few times I’d decided I wasn’t listening to people telling me to be quiet, and I’m so glad I did. That was like 30 years ago.

I noticed that a girl at a party had alcohol poisoning and got her to the hospital

My distant aunt and uncle got murdered in a horrible robbery. They had a daughter…my cousin. We hanged out as kids but lost touch until this event. A couple of weeks after the funeral I decided to call her to see how she was holding up. We chatted for a long time and she thanked me for checking on her. Months later she told me she was a few seconds away from suicide when I called called her that time… And our random conversation changed her approach to life.

I was a bike courier for years. One day I went into a building and someone was telling security that there was homeless guy passed out to the escalator. I went up the escalator and there were a bunch of business types standing around this guy (they were in the phone to 911). He was struggling to breathe and when I rolled him into recovery position he coughed up his tongue. So yeah, that was nice. I don’t know for sure, if he would have died.

My brother and I were going down a water slide. He was 3 or 4, I was about 7. He came out of the slide and landed upside down in his floaty. I flipped him back over. Simple in the moment, terrifying if I think about it for too long.

I was on a trip as a kid (probably… I dunno, 9 or 10 years old?) with my family. The hotel had a pool and the family brought me to have a swim. (They didn’t swim, just sat around the pool while I swam.)

It was just us at first, but soon another kid about my age showed up with no parents/supervision. He sat down on the edge of the pool at the deep end and dangled his feet. He conversed a little with me and my family, but otherwise was just there hanging out. He mentioned in passing that he couldn’t swim.

But then suddenly he was in the pool, thrashing and struggling.

My parents honestly had no idea what to do. One ran to grab the life buoy. I don’t remember quite what the other did.

But my swim lessons training kicked in and I did the thing. Jumped out of the pool, ran around to the side of the pool right where the kid was struggling, laid down on the ground next to the pool, and stuck one arm into the pool for him to grab. Worked just as well as my old swim instructor indicated it would.

Once he had me to hold him up out of the water, he was fine, of course. The rest was just a matter of helping him out of the pool.

It was after that that he revealed he had an ostomy bag and wasn’t supposed to be swimming at all, deep end or otherwise. (It was a hospital town and I got the impression he was in town to get some kind of treatment.)

We made sure he got back to his room safely and all.

That’s pretty much the whole story. I don’t know that he’d have died had nobody been there. And my bumbling parents probably would have figured a way to help him even if I wasn’t there. But he had a better chance of walking away from that by virtue of my (admittedly very rudimentary) swim lesson training.

And it was really dramatic being part of it.

As little kids my sister and i were playing by a river on a bank that was three feet above the water line. I fell in.

I pulled her in when she reached out to help me out.

She jumped on my back and i pulled every root and weed off the bank trying to find a hand hold to pull us out. This one root held…. I used that to pull us out of the river.