The mother came running out of the house holding her 18-month-old son, screaming, “He’s not breathing!”
Across the street, Matt Overcasher, a field technician at Columbia Gas of Ohio, didn’t hear her; he was inside the truck, working on paperwork for a job he and co-worker Steve Manypenny had just completed. But Manypenny, who was outside cleaning their tools, jerked his head up and immediately shouted to Overcasher. “When you work with someone every day, you know them,” said Overcasher. “It was, ‘I need you out here, right now.’ So I got out of that truck as fast as I could.”
The two men raced over to the distraught mother and father. As Overcasher cradled the child’s limp, unresponsive body in his arms, Manypenny pulled out his Blackline device for an immediate connection to emergency response. The frightened parents were able to tell them the child had not been eating and that they didn’t think anything was in his airway—but that he had been running a fever.
Overcasher immediately placed the child on the ground to confirm he wasn’t choking, then began to check vitals. Although the Marine veteran found faint breathing sounds and a shallow heartbeat, the child’s eyes were rolling back in his head and he was unconscious.
From his military and Columbia Gas of Ohio training, Overcasher knew that performing CPR on someone having difficulty breathing could cause more problems. So, he raised the child up, put the child’s head over his shoulder and began patting his back to help clear any phlegm and to keep the airway open.
The two men say that the 10 minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive were some of the longest of their lives. Both have been in emergency situations before, but never like this one and never with a child.
Soon after paramedics came on the scene, the child became responsive. Later, the men learned that the child had experienced a febrile seizure. While the parents were too overcome in the moment to say much, the father later reached out to Columbia Gas of Ohio to express his thanks. “He couldn’t say enough about these two fellows,” said Jamie Daniel, field operations leader.
“I’m glad it all turned out amazing—the best way it could have,” said Overcasher. Added Manypenny, “I’m right there with Matt. I’m glad we were there.”