We all like to think that in an emergency we would be the calm and collected person whose quick-thinking saves the day. But the truth of the matter is that, when it comes down to it, no one knows exactly what they would do when a case of life or death presents itself.

Luckily for New Zealander Izak Bester, he can always count on his girlfriend Sarah Glass to pull through and keep him safe. After all, Sarah is the woman responsible for saving his life just this week - in one of the most horrifying ways possible.

Izak was having a BBQ with his partner and a group of friends at a farm near Waimarama Beach, Hawke's Bay, when a piece of steak meat became lodged in his throat and he suddenly started choking. Realising that the situation was urgent, Izak's friends tried the Heimlich manoeuvre; however, this did not help the situation and resulted in the 50-year-old passing out.

Knowing that her boyfriend - who had turned blue and then purple - was rapidly running out of time, midwife Sarah knew that there was one thing she had to do. Moments after Izak's heartbeat stopped, Sarah made a risky split-second decision, grabbing a Stanley knife and jamming the blade into his throat.

Although it may initially sound as if Sarah was doing more harm than good, the small incision, just below her boyfriend's Adam Apple, was an emergency tracheotomy, a surgical procedure designed to open a direct airway through an incision in the windpipe. Incredibly, her heroic actions gave Izak the oxygen he needed in order to survive the suffocation.

Immediately after, the group of friends went into full "emergency mode" and calmly went about trying to save their friend's life, using a home birth kit with an oxygen tank to keep the oxygen flowing to the 50-year-old's brain. Amazingly, Izak, who was in an induced coma for nearly three days and kept in hospital for another week, survived the incident.

However, doctors told him if it weren't for the oxygen, he would have suffered brain damage or organ failure, if he had lived at all.

A tracheostomy is a risky, high-stress procedure normally performed in an operating room under general anaesthesia; but Sarah told Stuff that she knew that she either had to cut her partner's throat open or risk losing her boyfriend for good.

"We had no choice - it was do that or he was dead," she said. "I think anyone could do it if they're looking at someone they care about and it's the only thing that will keep them alive."

Izak has hailed the courageous actions of his partner, naming her a "hero". The Hastings crematorium and cemetery manager said: "She's definitely a hero - it's pretty amazing but if I died or been brain damaged she would have carried that for the rest of her life. But she said it was a no-brainer because I was dead already." In addition, he was full of praise for his other friends, saying: "They just never gave up - they did CPR for 30 minutes."

I think we can all agree that Sarah and all of the people involved in saving Izak's life are true heroes who refused to give up in the face of adversity. We certainly wouldn't mind having them having them around in an emergency.

Christmas with relatives is never drama-free.

But Lizzy Bristow's 2021 Christmas dinner takes some beating.

The specialist LGBTQ fitness coach - who goes by @bodybydaddy/LGBTQ FITNESS on TikTok - recounted the crazy story of how she rescued her girlfriend's grandma, right after she made a homophobic comment.

In a video posted to TikTok, Bristow recounted the dramatic moment.

"Do you what it's like to give CPR to your girlfriend's grandmother on Christmas, at Christmas dinner? Let me tell you," she begins, before launching into the story.

She continues: "Okay! So, it's Christmas dinner. I'm sitting next to her brother, across from me is the 91-year-old grandmother. My girlfriend's out of the room and her mom is out of the room.

"We had steak for dinner, it was delicious. The brother notices though, that the grandmother is chewing, looking down and she can't swallow something. She's really struggling."

Bristow then describes how things took a turn for the worse.

"All of a sudden her face turns blue, I stand up. 'Does anyone know the Heimlich?'

"The oldest brother, the strongest one, he tries. But he doesn't know what he's doing, because he's not CPR certified. I am. I jump up, he's like 'Take over, take over!' I'm like 'okay.'"

Bristow begins giving granny the Heimlich - but it's no good, and to her horror, the old lady faints in her arms.

"I lay her down on the ground and I start compressions. Everyone around me is losing it. I yell for someone to call 911, everyone just scatters," she continues.

She then reveals that this is the woman who just an hour earlier had made a homophobic comment when she asked Bristow if she was "the boy."

"And now I'm over her, and I'm giving her compressions, probably breaking her ribs."

Eventually, a small piece of steak appears in the grandma's mouth and she regains consciousness.

"I felt like I won the Super Bowl," Bristow recalled triumphantly.

"I never want to do that again. Everyone get CPR certified," she finished.

In a follow-up video, Bristow revealed that her CPR had in fact broken ribs - every single one of them.

She added that her girlfriend's grandma was recovering in hospital and that when she heard who her savior was she'd told Bristow that she's done a "good job."

And she wasn't the only one to congratulate the fitness coach, whose TikTok about the event had already racked up over 7.9 million views and over 13,000 comments.

Credit: TikTok

"For the rest of her life she’s going to recount the tale of the handsome young man that saved her life," one user joked.

"The boy? No ma’am. THE HERO!" added another.

Credit: TikTok

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Toward the end of last week and over the weekend, I'm sure that plenty of you got to sit around the table with your loved ones and enjoy a pretty good Thanksgiving evening. We talk about Black Friday and eating a ton of food, but spending time with people you love and/or barely tolerate is the true spirit of the holidays.

But one thing we don't talk about enough at Thanksgiving is the generous, altruistic spirit that comes over all of us at the holidays, where we bring happiness to others with our natural kindness. That's what happened at a restaurant in North Carolina, as a random stranger stepped in at just the right time to save a baby from choking.

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Hannah Jarvis was celebrating her first Thanksgiving with her seven-month-old daughter Calli and family of eight at a Golden Corral restaurant in Hendersonville. "We were just feeding her some mashed potatoes," Jarvis explained, but suddenly, disaster struck: "She just started gagging all of a sudden. She was choking."

"I had just walked back in from getting some food," Cimarron Waldrup, Jarvis' father (and Calli's grandfather) said of the incident. "I noticed something was going on wrong. They were getting out napkins. I thought she was just spitting up." A waitress, realising the danger, called out for someone - anyone - to help the choking infant.

But as panic started to set in, Waldrup recalled the impeding tragedy, his eyes welling up as he did so. "The folks turned to my grandbaby, and that's when that lady that saved her came up." At that moment, a woman by the name of Deborah Rouse stepped up, and saved the day when all seemed lost.

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"This lady named Deborah intervened, and she started performing the Heimlich maneuver on her," Jarvis explained. "She held her down, like this, taking multiple blows to her back. It was miraculous, she started breathing again. She told me her name is Deborah Rouse."

The Heimlich maneuver is actually a complicated techniques intended for adults, but experts say that Deborah Rouse employed a technique better suited for small children and infants, which involves blows to the back. Although Jarvis got a chance to thank Rouse amidst the chaos, she posted to Facebook, hoping to thank her properly.

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"If anyone knows who Deborah Rouse is, this lady is a hero!" Jarvis wrote on Facebook, hoping to track Rouse down for her heroics that day.

"If it weren't for this angel, my daughter probably would have been wheeled away in an ambulance today. Thank you for saving my daughter's life and thank you Trish from Golden Corral who helped intervene as well! My family and I can't thank you enough for helping. My daughter is fine and has been seen at the ER and is perfectly happy and healthy now."

Well done to Deborah Rouse, who it turns out, has five kids of her own. This holiday season, more than anything, is about taking notice of the ones we love around us, and everyone involved in this story will be acutely aware of that this Thanksgiving.

A video has emerged on social media showing a ninth-grade student saving a classmate's life.

According to KUTV News, Jackson Johnson was saved from choking by his fellow pupil Hunter Olson.

Surveillance cameras installed at West Jordan Middle School in Utah managed to capture the ordeal, which took place in the cafeteria when the boys were eating lunch.

Take a look at this footage of the incident in the video below:

Midway through their meal, Olson noticed that Johnson's face had turned blue and that he was unable to breathe after a piece of chicken became lodged in his throat.

Luckily, Olson had learned the Heimlich maneuver in his eighth-grader teacher Kathy Howa's health class, where students practiced life-saving techniques on Resusci-Annies body dummies.

Thus, he immediately lept to action. Wrapping his arms around Johnson's midriff, he pumped six times and eventually managed to dislodge the choking hazard.

Credit: Alamy/Science Photo Gallery

Per KUTV, Olson opened up about the incident in a podcast hosted by Jordan School District Superintendent Anthony Godfrey, stating: "My first instinct was just to come up and try to help as much as I could.

"I had to like, make sure he was actually choking first because we were all at the table, just laughing, just cause we thought he was just choking on something little, like, it went down the wrong tube or something.

"And then, he was just coughing over the garbage can."

Meanwhile, teacher Kathy Howa later told the West Jordan Journal: "You hope that those children are actually listening to you.

"When something like this happens, and you find out that they did—there is no greater reward than somebody that's actually saving somebody else's life."

Howa, who has been teaching for 28 years, also stated that she plans on showing the footage to future students to reinforce the idea that learning these life-saving skills can be valuable.

She added: "There's a lot of work in teaching, especially with what we've been going through, but it’s not about that.

"It's about touching these kids and hoping that you make them great human beings to go out in the community and to just be good people."

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A woman has issued a stark warning after her 34-year-old husband was subjected to the horrifying consequences of his drinking Red Bull every day.Meagan Shreve, who goes by the handle @ladyshreve on TikTok, shared a video about her spouse, Aaron Shreve, who has a caffeinated soda habit.She recounted the night her husband experienced sudden pain in his chest and had to be rushed to the hospital where medics performed chest compressions to resuscitate him, resulting in broken ribs.He was then forced to stay in the clinic for "five to six weeks" while cardiologists monitored his heart, but they had "no answers" as to why the seemingly healthy man had suffered the shock arrest.Watch the video below:Medics eventually concluded that Aaron's sudden health decline was caused by "dehydration," and that "he was having too many energy drinks"."This can be extremely, extremely dangerous...I watched this 105-pound woman drag my husband out of a chair and start chest compressions so hard that she broke his ribs," Meagan said in the clip.Meagan revealed in the comments section that her partner was consuming "two to three" energy drinks per day, as well as coffee.The TikToker then issued a warning for anyone who consumes energy drinks, saying if you're not going to give it up for yourself, "do it for the people in your life so they don't have to witness something like this"."I saw everybody flood in. I was pushed against a wall not knowing what to do," the store manager, who is based in Colorado, added.Meagan Shreve said her husband suffered a shock cardiac arrest caused by his energy drink habit. Credit: Justin Sullivan / GettyThe terrifying ordeal began in January this year when Aaron woke his wife up in the middle of the night after "his heart started racing, and his hands and feet were going numb"."He just didn't feel right," she continued. "I thought he was having a panic attack...he was like, I think you need to call 9-1-1, I think I need to go to the hospital," she said, adding that within "less than a minute" of seeing the hospital doctor, her husband had collapsed."All these alarms started going off...his heart stopped," she said. This led to hospital staff starting chest compressions in a bid to restart his heart and keep him aliveEnergy drinks have become increasingly popular, especially among young adults. In recent years, excessive consumption of caffeinated soda has been linked to an increase in many cardiovascular issues, including cardiac arrest, arrhythmias, heart attacks, and myocardial infarction.Energy drinks contain moderate to high amounts of caffeine and sugar, along with various stimulating ingredients like guarana, taurine, carnitine, and ginseng, per Healthline.Researchers at the Mayo Clinic examined the medical data of 144 patients, aged between 20 and 42, who had survived a cardiac arrest following emergency treatment.Seven of them ingested an energy drink before the life-threatening event, with six needing electrical shock treatment and one needing manual resuscitation, as reported by The Sun. One can contain around 80mg of caffeine - 20mg less than the average cup of coffee. Credit: Justin Sullivan / GettyResearchers discovered that other factors such as sleep deprivation, dehydration, dieting, smoking, and antibiotic medication, also contributed to the health decline."There's no discernible health benefit of consuming energy drinks," Dr. Ackerman said. "The absolute risk of danger is very low. The relative risk in the fragile heart is higher.""So, for my patients with long QT syndrome or any genetic heart disease that is associated with sudden cardiac death, the appropriate dose of a highly caffeinated energy drink is 0. It's not worth the relative risk exposure when there's no upside to be gained from the product," she added.Featured image credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty

A five-year-old girl died after she choked on a frankfurter sausage while in the back seat of her mom's car.

On January 16, Imogen Lennon, from New South Wales, Australia, was on her way back home with her mom Sam after finishing her swimming lessons.

Imogen and Sam were chatting while the little one was eating her favorite snack when she suddenly began choking, family friend Tamara Harrison said in a GoFundMe.

Credit: GoFundMe

The fundraiser has surpassed its initial goal of $25,000 following hundreds of donations.

The description for the GoFundMe reads: "Imogen was a bright, determined, loving and sassy 5yr old who sadly grew her wings on Monday the 16th of January due to the most tragic and unlikely event.

"Imogen's Mum Sam picked Imogen up from swimming lessons on the afternoon of the 16th. On the drive home, Imogen was happily eating a deli frankfurt( a favourite after swimming) and chatting away to her mum from the back seat, when she suddenly started choking.

"Despite Sam's heroic efforts, ringing an ambulance, the help of a passerby and eventually driving Imogen to the hospital herself ( the ambulance was too far away to make it in time ) Beautiful Imogen passed away later at the hospital."

Harrison went on to add: "To make sense of such a tragic loss in such a way is inconceivable, there are no words that could accurately describe how shattered Imogen's family are. It is Impossible to Imagine life without Imogen."

She is hoping to raise enough money to cover little Imogen's funeral costs in order to alleviate some of the financial burden her parents are facing.

The family friend added: "Anyone that knows this couple knows that they are true Aussie battlers, always helping others. They would give the shirts off their backs, without a second thought should someone be in need.

"The burden of trying to find the money to pay for Imogen's final resting place and a fitting celebration of her short life is a burden that I would like to remove for this family, while they deal with such an unthinkable tragedy.

"I know they will be eternally grateful for any assistance, big or small."

The GoFundMe donors have been sharing their condolences, with one sympathetic person writing: "I’m so incredibly sorry for the heartbreaking loss of beautiful Imogen, in such a tragic and sudden way. I don’t know you and your family but my thoughts and love are with you all regardless.

"No one should ever have to face this. I know nothing anything of us say or do will take away the pain. She loves you always as you do her. Be gentle with yourselves."

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Another added: "We are so sorry, Samantha and Bill. We only met Immy once but she was so bright, bubbly and beautiful we'll remember her always that way. With love, Tim and Melody."

Credit: GoFundMe

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