It was a warm day in August, when Cookstown resident Tanner Forsyth was driving home from visiting his mother’s house in Bradford, north on 10th Sideroad near 5th Line, when he noticed a van pulled over on the side of the road with a family of three pacing outside, looking frantic.
As a firefighter and generally concerned citizen, he decided to stop to see what was going on and see if they required any assistance.
“I saw they (the adults) had a small child in between them and they looked hysterical," he recalls.
When Forsyth asked what was wrong, they told him that their daughter was choking.
“It seemed like they (the parents) had exhausted all of their options, which is why they were panicking so much,” he explained.
As a trained firefighter, he asked the parents if he could administer First Aid on the child. The father, who was holding the child, immediately passed her over to Forsyth, desperate for anyone to help his daughter.
“It looked like the girl wasn’t breathing. She wasn’t blue yet, but she wasn’t moving, kind of like dead weight,” he remembers.
Without wasting anytime, Forsyth immediately lied the child face down over his knee on a downward angle and proceeded to perform life saving back blows.
“Two or three of those and the obstruction popped out, she started crying. I just picked her up and handed her back to the dad, she was crying, breathing normally,” he recalled.
The obstruction? A large chunk of fruit.
Forsyth checked her vitals to make sure she was fine, but advised the family to go to the hospital anyway as a precaution.
The parents, he said, were in some shock, but were able to muster up a few thank yous before parting ways.
“It seemed like they were in shock. They could hardly even talk afterwards,” he said.
Forsyth says it all happened so quickly that he never got the chance to catch the name of the girl or her parents.
He reached out to BradfordToday in an effort to try and find the child he saved.
“It’s not like I wanted to pump my own tires or anything,” he explained.
But the experience has left him wondering who the family is and how they are doing.
Forsyth, who used to live in Bradford, but recently moved to Cookstown, studied fire fighting at school in Alberta as part of a fast track program. When he graduated, he came back home to Bradford and joined the BWG Volunteer Firefighter team for a year and a half before getting hired full time with Toronto Fire Services.
He says he is appreciative of all the important training he received while with the BWG Fire Department, and how it helped him save the choking child that one day this past summer.
“Bradford trained me and that’s kind of where I built up my qualifications,” he said.
“I was fortunate enough to get training and experience with Bradford (Fire) and I could build on that moving forward into the next step of my career.”
He says the lifesaving training he received is so ingrained in his brain, that it felt like second nature when it came time to apply it in a real life scenario.
“It’s just the training that you revert back to, you just know what you need to do, and you just do it,” he said. “It’s like a flight or fight mechanism.”
This Christmas, Forsyth hopes the family he helped is doing well, and wishes to touch base from their missed connection.
"When I think about that moment, I wonder how she (the child) is doing, or when she grows up, is she going to remember that time a stranger was there to help when in need? Perhaps this may inspire her to become a firefighter in the future," he said.
"And it’s Christmas time and it would bring me joy to give her a present if possible."
