For Ashley Shaeffer, it was a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
Ashley was delivering a cup of coffee to her mother at Kingman High School last week when she heard a call over the school's handheld radio system that a student was choking and unresponsive in the lunchroom.
Ashley reported that "When I heard the announcement, I ran to the lunchroom. The student was turning purple and he didn't have a pulse, so I immediately started CPR to keep his heart beating and circulate oxygen through his brain until an ambulance could get here. It's just second nature to me as a nurse. You do what you have to do to keep someone alive."
The 19-year-old special needs student, who has cerebral palsy and communicates with his hands, was eating lunch when he tried to swallow too much food. Ashley said there was so much food in his throat that she and school staff pulled some out five times before an ambulance arrived and emergency workers used a scope to remove the rest of it so he could breathe.
As of Tuesday, the student remained in the hospital, where he is being tested for swallowing problems. Ashley said she visited him after the incident and introduced herself to the young man, who smiled and waved at her.
"The emergency room doctor said the student wouldn't be here today if we hadn't done CPR. I'm proud that I'm homegrown and could pay back my community this way. This was exactly where God wanted me to be that day."