Lombard employee saves choking coworker

The way Sharon Myers sums it up, her near-death experience at lunchtime Wednesday actually was pretty simple.

“I choked; she helped; we went back to work,” said Myers, water billing supervisor for the village of Lombard, who was saved when co-worker Cyndie Orbik performed the Heimlich maneuver.

Myers was at her desk on the first floor of Lombard’s village hall, eating a sandwich for lunch when she began choking.

Diagnosed with asthma several years ago, Myers said she knows how it feels to struggle for air. But this felt worse.

“This was like no air, totally no air,” Myers said. “I obviously knew something was wrong right away.”

By a reaction she described as instinctual, she ran through the doors separating her office from the village hall front desk, where Orbik works as a customer service representative. Then Orbik’s own instincts — and her CPR and Heimlich maneuver training — took over.

“I just did what anybody else would do,” Orbik said. “Our fire department puts themselves on the line every day — to me that’s a hero. I just did a good thing, that’s all.”

Orbik and Myers both were among village employees trained by the Lombard Fire Department in early 2009 to perform lifesaving assistance including the Heimlich maneuver, CPR and use of an automatic external defibrillator.

“Training does give you the confidence to make decisions if and when the time arises,” Lombard’s Fire Marshal Chuck Riforgiate said. “That’s the important aspect of training.”

Even though Orbik’s training took place more than two years ago, she said it functioned exactly as Riforgiate said it would, helping her get over her fear of stepping in when she noticed Myers was choking.

“I’m just glad I had the training,” Orbik said.

And in a twist of fate, once the piece of sandwich flew from Myers’ mouth allowing her to breathe again, she and Orbik remembered they had been partners during the 2009 training session.

Orbik said the fire department did not respond to Myers’ choking episode Wednesday. Myers was breathing easy enough to go back to work.

As she sat at her desk after lunch, she went through plenty of “what-ifs” in her head — What if she had passed out? What if no one realized she was choking? What if the closest person didn’t know how to save her?

Luckily for Myers, none of the what-ifs came true.