He Goes by the Book in a Moment of Crisis

When Corbett Burns goes to the public library, he usually checks out the books any 8-year-old boy would--books on sports, like basketball and football.

But last year, something a little different caught his eye. Corbett borrowed a book about first-aid.

And Zola Lee, his 65-year-old great-grandmother, is awfully glad he did.

It was Friday morning when Corbett woke up in the Compton home he shares with Lee and her husband, Arthur, a retired Los Angeles Unified School District employee, and heard something he didn’t like.

“She was sounding like she was gagging,” said Corbett, a third-grader at Redeemer Alternate School. Corbett, fully awake, sprung out of bed and immediately realized his great- grandmother was in deep distress.

“I started pushing down on her stomach,” he recalled Monday, motioning with both hands. “She wasn’t too good. She wasn’t breathing. I thought she was dead.”

Corbett quickly tried something else.

“I opened her mouth and gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, like I had seen in the book.”

While other family members telephoned for paramedics, Corbett kept working until he stopped for a rest, put his head down on his great-grandmother’s chest and heard her heart beating.

Paramedics soon arrived, put Lee in an ambulance and took her to Los Angeles County Martin Luther King Jr. Drew Medical Center. Later, she was transferred to Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Los Angeles where, by Monday afternoon, she was feeling well enough to banter with her great-grandson.

Doctors there were still doing tests to measure the severity of Lee’s heart attack, but there wasn’t much doubt that it had indeed been a heart attack and that young Corbett’s cardiopulmonary resuscitation, remembered from a book he had read a year ago, had come in handy.

Praise From Paramedics

Arthur Lee said the paramedics had asked Corbett where he learned CPR. They said they thought it might have saved Lee’s life. Zola Lee, sitting up in her hospital bed, said she figured he had picked it up watching television and she seemed a bit surprised Monday when he told her it was from a library book.

“He’s my hero,” she said with a smile, wrapping an arm around the boy.

Arthur Lee said he and his wife figure they owe Corbett that toy he has wanted for some time now.

“It’s a Transformer, a tape recorder that turns into a robot,” Corbett piped in, smiling at the thought of it--just like any 8-year-old boy would.