Rachel Black was taking an order from customers at an outdoor table at Bourbons when she looked across the street and immediately knew something was wrong.
A woman was choking. Her friends were striking her on the back, trying to help.
Black stopped in the middle of taking her customers’ orders.
“I said, ‘Hold on. I think I see someone choking,’” Black recalled.
Then she ran.
Black, a server at Bourbons, 440 W. Main St. in Brighton, threw up her hands to stop traffic, sprinted across the busy two-lane street and approached the woman directly.
“They were like, ‘You know the Heimlich?’” Black said. “I was like, ‘Yep,’ and I just got in there real quick.”
As it happened, Black had refreshed those skills only weeks earlier.
She was recently accepted into the ultrasound program at Oakland Community College and completed a certification course just a few weeks before the incident that included training on what to do when someone is choking.
“It was the perfect time for me to just go over there and really help her and apply my newly refreshed skills,” Black said.
She began performing abdominal thrusts, and she could tell they were having some effect. She asked the woman whether she was OK.
“She said, ‘No,’” Black recalled. “So I kept going.”
Back across the street, Black’s co-worker Shane Maloney saw what was happening.
“I saw the lady choking across the street,” Maloney said. “So then I ran across the street, too.”
Maloney had performed the Heimlich maneuver before, including once about 15 years ago at Bourbons when it operated under a different name.
By the time he reached Black and the choking woman, Black had already been working to clear the obstruction. Maloney stepped in and took over for a time.
“I knew what she was doing had helped,” Maloney said.
The woman was able to get some air, but the emergency was not yet over. Maloney continued the maneuver before another woman approached from across the street.
“She said, ‘I’m a doctor,’” Maloney recalled. “And I was like, ‘Great. Fantastic.’”
Inside, Bourbons manager Nate Kamal said he realized something was happening when he saw Maloney run across the street.
When he reached the patio and saw Black performing the Heimlich maneuver, Kamal called out to customers asking whether anyone was a doctor or nurse. A woman was already crossing the street to help, and customers at her table told him she was a doctor.
Kamal said the doctor later told him that by the time she arrived and performed one abdominal thrust, she could already hear air moving through the woman’s airway.
“Whatever our staff did, Rachel and Shane and their attempts solved the issue,” Kamal said, recounting the doctor’s assessment.
The people who had been with the choking woman later called Bourbons to thank Black and Maloney.
“They’re just good people,” Kamal said, recounting what the callers had told him about the servers. “That’s what was really awesome to hear.”
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From the moment Black first saw the woman in distress until the emergency had passed, the episode lasted about five minutes.
Someone called 911, and once Black knew the woman was going to be all right, she returned across the street to her tables.
Her customers had watched the entire episode unfold.
“They all were just praising me for really just getting on it as fast as I did,” Black said.
The victim remained shaken and took some time to recover. Black said she also seemed embarrassed by the attention surrounding the medical emergency.
“There weren’t many words,” Black said. “I feel like the poor girl was pretty embarrassed. … I was just trying to be observant of that.”
Black did not linger once emergency services had been called and the woman was safe.
Her own adrenaline, however, took considerably longer to subside.
“Once I got home, I was able to relax a little bit and calm down from the day,” she said. “But it was pretty intense for sure for a while there.”
Maloney experienced much the same thing. Once he knew the woman was safe, he went back to work.
“I knew she was OK,” he said. “She was going to be fine.”
By the next day, both Black and Maloney were back at work.
Kamal said the incident left him with “nothing but admiration” for the two employees.
“I’m just proud that I get to work here with people that genuinely do care about others,” Kamal said. “They dropped what they were doing just to go help somebody, and it’s really beautiful to be a part of a team like that.”
