The lunchroom in any middle school can be loud and chaotic. No one knows that better than teachers on lunch duty.
And in May, South Orange Middle School STEM teacher Anthonio “Tony” Fuda, was making the rounds of the 6th Grade lunch tables, calling them up to get their food, when some kids ran up to him yelling that their friend was choking.
From there things moved fast.
“I have no idea who those students were. I can’t tell you their faces, I just heard their words,” Fuda said. “They said, ‘Aubrie is choking, she’s choking,’ and they pointed me towards her. I dropped what I had in my hands, ran over to her, and saw that there was no air coming out, which is a big sign there’s a blockage in the airway.”
Trained in CPR, Fuda performed the Heimlich maneuver two or three times and unlodged the food that was stuck in sixth grader Aubrie Summers’ throat.
“Adrenaline was pumping at that point,” Fuda said. “And then she started breathing. She told me what she choked on, so she had her recognition and everything, and it seemed like it was just, like, a very brief choking incident.”
Aubrie recalled being scared and unable to breathe.
“I was crying because I thought I was gonna die, but I didn’t,” she said. “If Mr. Fuda hadn’t been there then, I would have.”
Aubrie said that she had been laughing and joking around with her friends when she breathed the food into her airway and suddenly couldn’t breathe.
“I started choking on my food, like a piece of salad, and at first my friends thought I was joking, but then they were like, ‘Wait! Get an adult!’ “ she said.
It was a pay-it-forward moment for Fuda, whose said his own life was also saved by the Heimlich maneuver in 2000, when he was a freshman in high school and a coach performed it on him when he was choking.
“From that moment, I thought this is the simplest thing you can do to save someone,” he said, adding that he first became CPR certified shortly after that when becoming a lifeguard as a teen.
Aubrie Summers gives a thumbs up with her lunchroom hero, “Mr. Fuda.” (Photo courtesy of Anthonio Fuda)
Now, 26 years later – and as a teacher for 17 of those years – he is glad he knows how to do the Heimlich and thinks everyone should.
Aubrey was so grateful that the next day, when she saw Fuda, she gave him a big hug.
When talking to The Village Green together on Friday, Fuda shared with Aubrey the story of the coach saving him.
“Now, you’ve gotta learn how to do the Heimlich maneuver,” he told her, “so you might be able to pay it forward in your life someday, too. You never know.”
At the May Board of Education meeting, Superintendent Jason Bing recognized Fuda for “his calm and heroic actions” in the cafeteria that day, “preventing what could have been a tragic situation.”
Fuda said he didn’t think much about it until that recognition from SOMS Principal Dr. Lynn Irby and Bing.
For Fuda, his being in the cafeteria at that exact moment, felt like destiny. Especially since he has been at SOMS less than a year.
“Everything in the Universe lined up,” he said. “New job position, lunch duty and just the right place, right time, right knowledge.”
