EDITORIAL

by April Taylor Record Reporter
Published: May 22, 2008

In a few short months, athletes from all over the world will gather in Beijing to compete against each other for shiny medals during Summer Olympics 2008. New heroes are sure to be born from the world event.
Funny thing about heroes: they often are right under your nose.
Take Karen Morris of Greene County. She is our latest local champion.
Morris is a physical education teacher at Greene County Primary School. Before suffering a painful shoulder injury last year, she drove a school bus for at least 10 years. Now she serves as a monitor on the bus.
Last Friday afternoon, Morris was on her bus route with driver Stephanie Shifflett, dropping children off from school. They were just about at the end of the route.
Every day, this particular bus goes through a part of Albemarle County before coming back into Greene.
But this day would offer something different.
That afternoon, on Route 810, an elderly lady came running toward the road, flagging down the school bus.  Shifflett stopped the bus. The woman frantically said to Morris and Shifflett, “Please help me. My husband is choking!”
Morris, trained in First Aid and CPR, said she hopped off the bus and “ran up the hill” toward the woman’s house. Shifflett stayed with the few remaining children on the bus.
Morris found the lady’s husband outside the house, slumped over but still standing. She asked him, “Sir, can you breathe?”
No answer. All he could do was weakly shake his head.
Morris, though scared, jumped into action as fast as any Olympic champion. She practiced the Heimlich maneuver, administering a series of abdominal thrusts.
“With my shoulder injury, I didn’t know if I could do it,” Morris recalls. “I was scared out of my mind.”
She adds, “But I couldn’t let this man choke.”
At first, nothing happened. Then, before the third thrust, the elderly man was able to speak. “I can breathe,” he said.
Morris verified with him that he was okay and then used the school bus radio to call for medical help. Morris then left the house to finish out the bus route with Shifflett.  They stopped by to check on the couple on the way back.
The wife told Morris, “If you hadn’t been there, he would have died.”
As typical with most heroes, Morris is modest about her role in saving a life that day.
She says, “I don’t think I did anything more than anybody else would have done. I did what I felt I had to do at the time.”
Bravo to Morris. She gets the gold on this one.