Imagine this: you are  in a public area, going about your day, when someone near you suddenly collapses. When faced with a life or death experience, could any of us confidently say we could remain level-headed in order to carry out what is necessary? As for five high school teens from Penang, Malaysia, that is  exactly what they managed to do. 

 On September 1, 2018, at a Chung Ling High School soccer game, 14-year-old St . John Ambulance Malaysia (SJAM) cadet , Ansley Tan Zhong, first noticed that Long Soo Keat, a 49-year-old real estate agent, had fainted from cardiac arrest. Quickly notifying the others of the SJAM — Gabriel Soon Chai Long, Liong Jun Yong, S. Shaman, and Tang Yi Ze — Ansley told a bystander to fetch them a public AED in the school. Recalling the events in an interview with The Star, Gabriel said that Keat’s,  “pulse was irregular and then stopped… [these were] the sign[s] of a heart attack.” 

 Despite their  training and knowledge of CPR, such as cycling 30 chest compressions with two breaths, it was the first time conducting actual CPR on the field . Nevertheless, the boys remained calm and collected, taking control of the situation with their knowledge from training.  “The AED’s voice-prompt kept telling me to ‘push harder’ The victim was bigger than me and I used all my strength,” told Gabriel to The Star. “The device gave him three shocks and when the ambulance came, he was given another shock with the ambulance’s defibrillator. Only after that did his heart beat again,” he added. 

 For 12 minutes, Keat was clinically dead, barely clinging to life with the help of the five boys of the SJAM. It truly was a miracle, with cardiac arrest survival rates in Malaysia hovering around a mere  1%. After nearly two weeks of recovery, Keat was discharged on the 14th and expressed his gratitude to the boys’ courageous actions, calling them heroes.

He was right. Heroes indeed.