ESPANOLA—Two young Whitefish River First Nation (WRFN) men are being called heroes for their efforts in saving the life of a two-year-old boy from choking in an incident at an Espanola restaurant.
“I am so glad that they were there last night,” Brittany Ackworth, the mother of two-year-old Jameson told The Expositor the day following the January 4 incident. “If it wasn’t for them, I don’t know what would have happened to my son. The ambulance did get there fairly quickly, but he was already unconscious, so who knows if he would have had any brain damage or anything.”
Ms. Ackworth, who works at the Cortina’s Restaurant in Espanola was there with her family for dinner, had got appetizers and then Jameson started eating some bread, putting too much food into his mouth and began choking.
Jameson began choking to the point of not breathing and becoming unresponsive. Both the server and the father tried to revive the child. This is when Talon McGregor and his brother Mskwoka stepped up and performed lifesaving measures and were able to revive the young boy.
Elsie Rubia, manager of Cortina’s explained, “Brittany is one of our servers in the restaurant, and she and her three boys, aged 2, 8, 14 and her husband were in for dinner. They had appetizers and her youngest helped himself to some bread which got stuck in his throat. It was at this time two of our servers started yelling to get 911. Talon and his brother jumped right in and saved him. Jameson lost consciousness and went limp at one point. They saved him. Thank God for there being here at the right time.”
“Originally we were going to go to the movies to see ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ that evening because it was my brother’s last day of holidays before he was going to go back to Kingston as he is in the Canadian Armed Forces and is taking military training,” Talon McGregor explained last Thursday. “We wanted to do something to celebrate his last day of holidays and were going to go to a movie in Sudbury but didn’t want to drive far due to the weather. So, we decided to grab dinner locally.”
“We were sitting down ordering our dinner and a few minutes went by. Then we heard a commotion at a table close by, and thought it was staff or someone in a kerfuffle or something so we didn’t think much of it,” said Talon. “But it soon escalated, people were screaming and crying and saying ‘he’s choking’.”
Mskwoka explained, “we were at the restaurant sitting down and we heard a commotion, and thought it was just an argument between staff or a family, but it got much louder and that is when we got up to see if we could help out. There was a two-year-old boy who was choking on some food.”
“My brother performed the Heimlich maneuver and the probably 50 seconds or so seemed to take an eternity before Talon could get the youngster breathing again,” said Mskwoka. At the same time, “I jumped in to help the rest of the family, the parents and their two other boys who were all in utter distress, both of them saying, ‘Oh my God,’ because they thought he was dead. I talked to them and tried to comfort them. My brother continued to resuscitate the boy.”
Talon McGregor, who is 25, explained, “The little one was having a really hard time breathing and was choking. I told them I had training for this and asked the staff and the parents if I could take him and the parents gave me the little one. My brother helped by comforting the parents and their two other children.”
“The parents gave me permission to take the little one and I performed the Heimlich, we call it ab thrusts, and to see if I could get him to cough up the food,” said Talon. “I was able to take one knee and able to give him back blows. At this point the youngster was virtually passed out. I had tunnel vision now; I kept going to see if I could give the kid a chance. Finally, he coughed up bits of food and was crying which was a great sign.”
“Someone got the mother to come over when he was okay,” Talon, who is a community health nurse in WRFN, explained. “’The paramedics were on their way,’ she was told. It was only a couple of minutes but it felt like forever.”
“It was just the little one’s fate that it was meant to be that he would be okay,” said Talon. “The little one fought, he decided it was not his time. I was just happy we were able to give the little guy a second chance. I just hope the family is okay, they were in a lot of distress, understandably.”
Talon said that, fortunately, with his profession, he takes updated first-aid training courses on a regular basis.
The boys are both from WRFN, and Mskwoka, who started in the military in August, is in Alloy training as well as going to school at Royal Military College said, “we were happy when we heard the youngster was taken by ambulance to the hospital and was going to be okay.”
“It was a wild turn of events,” said Mskwoka. “We are both so happy that fate had us at the restaurant.”
“This was the best outcome we could hope for,” stated Talon. “Oh yes, this incident will stay with us forever. We did the best we could.”
“We ended up going home after enjoying our dinner to watch the Canada-US world junior hockey game,” said Talon. “Overall, everything happened the way it was supposed to, and everyone was okay.”
At 5 am on January 5, “Mskwoka was on a bus back to Kingston and I was wishing him the safest trip forward,” said Talon. “It isn’t until later that you realize everything turned out the best for the little one. We had to help, the little one has barely even started his life yet.”
Ms. Ackworth brough Jameson to the hospital after the incident and said he was fine and acted like nothing had happened.
