Teen honored for quick thinking that saved little brother’s life
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POCATELLO – When Ryker Chaney awoke to the sound of his brother whimpering, he still thought it was a regular night.
The two boys, 15-year-old Ryker and 10-year-old Jaxon Chaney, had stayed up late on the night of Dec. 17. With the two-week winter break just around the corner, their parents, Brad and Rachel Chaney, had let them stay up late.
“They asked if they could sleep downstairs, and so we said it was OK for them to hang out and kind of have a slumber party downstairs,” Rachel told EastIdahoNews.com.
The brothers spent the night playing a new video game, “Marvel Rivals,” before they went to sleep around 11 p.m. on the family’s L-shaped couch. Ryker woke up around six hours later, hearing Jaxon make noises that “kind of sounded like a cry.”
“I sat up and looked over, and I thought he was just having a nightmare,” Ryker said. “I called out his name multiple times. He didn’t respond, and then that’s when I saw a bit of puke spit out of his mouth.”
The older brother sprang into action, rushing to Jaxon’s side.
“I was yelling at him and trying to get him up,” Ryker said.
Ryker rolled Jaxon onto his side and kept trying to wake him up, but Jaxon remained unresponsive.
“I just kind of started panicking,” Ryker told EastIdahoNews.com.
Ryker then rushed to get his parents help.
“I just sprinted up the stairs, and all the dogs started following me, and (I) tripped a little, and then ran into my parents’ room,” Ryker said. “It took me a minute to get the words out, but then I was able to tell them what was happening.”
When Brad got to Jaxon’s side, he tried to wake him up, but he remained unconscious. As soon as she saw Jaxon’s face, Rachel knew something wasn’t right.
“He was unresponsive, and it looked like there was some liquid, but there was discoloration,” Rachel said. “I just looked at his face, and he was just checked out. He wasn’t there.”
While she dialed 911, Brad and Ryker carried Jaxon back up the stairs into the kitchen. Brad then called out to Rachel that Jaxon had stopped breathing.
Because of Rachel’s job as a paralegal at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center, she’s trained in CPR. She had to put this training to use as she put the operator on speaker phone and started doing chest compressions.
The operator helped Rachel keep count as she performed CPR. Brad checked to see if something was clogging Jaxon’s throat, which made him gag, but Jaxon remained unresponsive.
“He started turning discolored. He was going a grayish-blue color, and I just kept going with the compressions,” Rachel said.
Rachel continued performing CPR for around four minutes until the ambulance arrived and the paramedics took over, who used a defibrillator and performed chest compressions to bring him back to consciousness.
When the responding team took Jaxon out on a stretcher, they had a clear path to exit thanks to Ryker’s efforts. While his father and mother were assisting Jaxon, he moved the table and chairs out of the way for the paramedics.
“I just assessed the situation and knew that they would have to grab him, pick him up and take him out fast,” Ryker said. “So I just grabbed stuff, moved it to the side and let them deal with stuff.”
Despite the fear they all felt in the moment, Ryker felt “hope” when the ambulance arrived.
“I started to believe that everything was going to be OK,” Ryker said.
Jaxon was first transported to Portneuf Medical Center, but the doctors soon decided he needed to be taken by helicopter to Intermountain Health Primary Children’s Hospital.
Although the 10-year-old was awake at PMC and was able to respond to questions, he has no memory of any of the night’s events until he woke up at Primary Children’s after being sedated. Jaxon said that he was thinking, “What am I doing here?” when he woke up.
“That’s the first thing that a person wants to say when they get teleported somewhere,” Jaxon said.
Jaxon is doing well, but doctors are unsure what caused him to go into congestive heart failure. The parents opted for a surgery to give Jaxon a pacemaker to save him if he experiences a similar event.
One of Ryker’s family members nominated him for an award from the Bannock County Sheriff’s Office to honor him for the efforts he took to save his brother’s life. On Jan. 24, Sheriff Tony Manu awarded Ryker with a certificate of achievement.
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In the days after the incident, the family tried to tell Ryker how important it was that he woke up and reacted when he did.
“We just kept trying to tell Ryker how proud we were that he responded, and if he hadn’t, it could have been much different circumstances,” Rachel said. “And Ryker, he just shrugged and was like, ‘Well, it was a family effort.’”
“If any of those things didn’t happen exactly how they did, if Ryker didn’t wake up when he heard him and then roll him onto his side and come get us immediately, it would have definitely been a different morning,” Brad said.
It made Jaxon teary-eyed to talk about how much it means to him that Ryker responded so quickly when he was in distress.
“I was just, really happy for what he did,” Jaxon told EastIdahoNews.com.
When asked why Ryker took Jaxon’s soft cries so seriously so soon, he responded that he just doesn’t like to see any of his family members in distress. To him, protecting his family is what’s most important.
“I don’t really care about anything that’s going on in the world, just as long as me and my family are safe, everything’s OK. I love them all. They’re my lifeline,” Ryker said.
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