Beyond Friendship: Alumni Inspire Students and Faculty

What would you do if you were a teenager hanging out with a friend and enjoying some baseball practice on a hot summer afternoon, and your friend collapsed, stopped breathing, and was unresponsive? Unfortunately, this was a real scenario, but it does have a happy ending.

 

Friends and former Eaglebrook classmates Kiernan Keller ’19 and Bobby Miele ’19 were hanging out, doing some baseball skills practicing one hot June afternoon last summer. Bobby was experiencing a racing heart and went into cardiac arrest. Kiernan, who had Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, CPR, training while he was a student at Eaglebrook, immediately dialed 911 and started performing CPR on his friend. It took 15 minutes for the EMTs to arrive at the scene, and Kiernan had kept up with CPR that entire time. Bobby was later diagnosed with a syndrome that was unnoticed until that day.

 

Without Kiernan’s quick action, Bobby would not have made it past that hot June day. They came to Eaglebrook on Friday, March 25 to tell their story. This was the day before all Eaglebrook students were going to have CPR training and a few days after all of the faculty went through the same training.

 

Kiernan explained to the group, “At the moment when I needed to use it, I remembered bits and pieces of what I needed to get me started,” he said. He continued by saying, “What was comforting was having the familiarity with CPR from having gone through the training at Eaglebrook…My message to you is to be involved and present in your training.”

 

This amazing story provided a perfect way to kick off an important day of training for our Eaglebrook students, and it also showed the power of friendship, learning, and being brave. Please watch Bobby and Kiernan’s story here.