A Big Man Started Choking at a Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest. A Teen Girl Vaulted the Table. Then He Gasped: ‘You’re the Girl I Cut From Tryouts’
At an Ohio Fourth of July hot dog eating contest, a big contestant began choking and turning purple. A teen girl vaulted the table and did the Heimlich. Then he recognized her, and another contestant slumped over.
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Derek Simms hit the grass before anyone could catch him.
He wasn’t choking. Kayla could tell right away, because she had learned the difference in that first aid course she’d paid for herself. He wasn’t clutching his throat. He wasn’t struggling. He was just lying there, eyes half open, not responding.
“Derek! Derek!” his girlfriend was screaming from the crowd.
Kayla dropped to her knees beside him.
Check, Call, Care
She tapped his shoulders hard. “Derek! Can you hear me?” Nothing. She put her ear near his mouth and watched his chest. He was breathing, but only barely, and his skin was pale and clammy and cold to the touch, even in the ninety-degree heat.
“You,” she said, pointing straight at a man in a Buckeyes shirt, exactly the way her instructor had taught her. “Call 911. Tell them a man collapsed and he’s barely breathing. You,” she pointed at Maddie, “go to the first aid tent and get the AED. Run.”
They ran.
Then Derek’s girlfriend pushed through the crowd, crying. “He’s diabetic,” she sobbed. “He’s type one. He didn’t eat breakfast because he wanted to be hungry for the contest. He took his insulin this morning anyway.”
Kayla’s mind clicked into place. It wasn’t his heart. It was his blood sugar. He had taken insulin, skipped breakfast, stood in the heat all morning, and his blood sugar had crashed.
“Does he have glucose tabs? A kit? Anything?”
The girlfriend tore through her purse and pulled out an emergency glucagon kit. Her hands were shaking too badly to open it.
A Second Pair of Hands
That’s when a big hand reached over and steadied the girlfriend’s hands.
It was Coach Rick. He was still coughing, still red-faced, his shirt covered in mustard and water. But he was on his knees on the grass next to Kayla.
“Tell me what you need, Brooks,” he said.
Kayla looked at him for half a second. Then she nodded. “Hold his head steady and turn him on his side, in case he throws up. I’ll do the kit.”
The man who had told her she was too small to pull a grown man out of the deep end did exactly what she said.
Kayla read the instructions on the kit, mixed the medicine, and gave Derek the injection in his outer thigh, just like the diagram showed. Then they waited. Ten seconds. Thirty seconds. A minute. The crowd had gone completely silent. Somebody was praying out loud.
At around four minutes, Derek’s eyelids fluttered. He groaned. He mumbled, “Did I win?”
The whole park laughed and cried at the same time.
The Ambulance
Paramedics from the township fire department arrived a few minutes later. They checked Derek’s blood sugar, gave him fluids, and loaded him into the ambulance as a precaution. Before they closed the doors, one of the paramedics turned to Kayla.
“Who gave him the glucagon?”
“I did,” she said quietly.
The paramedic nodded. “You did everything right. Every single step. Where did you get your training?”
Before Kayla could answer, Coach Rick spoke up.
“She’s one of my lifeguards,” he said.
Too Small
Later, when the crowd had cleared out and the contest had been officially canceled, Coach Rick found Kayla sitting alone on the bleachers by the lake, still shaking a little.
He sat down beside her. For a while, neither of them said anything. Fireworks crews were setting up on the beach for the night.
“I told you that you couldn’t pull a grown man out of the deep end,” he finally said. “And today you pulled two out of the deep end. One of them was me.”
Kayla stared at her sneakers.
“I was wrong, Brooks,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for twenty years and I judged you by your size, not by your heart. That’s on me. I’m sorry.”
He pulled a whistle on a red lanyard out of his pocket. It was the spare he always carried.
“There’s an opening at the pool. Starts Monday. If you’ll still have us.”
Kayla took the whistle. She was crying again, but this time it was the good kind.
One Year Later
Kayla Brooks worked at the county pool that whole summer and the next. She made two saves in the deep end, both of them grown men. Derek came to the pool on her first day with a giant foam trophy that said “REAL CHAMPION” in marker.
And the Great Millersport Hot Dog Showdown still happens every Fourth of July. But now there are new rules: an EMT team at the table, mandatory breakfast for every contestant, and a free first aid and CPR class for anyone in town, taught every June by the county’s youngest lifeguard and the coach who once cut her.
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