Profile of Heroism-Final Draft

Most people are close with your grandparents, but when something goes wrong and don’t know the outcome and things get scary then that relationship turns and becomes even more close and strong. You don’t think about how quickly you could lose a loved one, till the till something happens and you could lose them.

Emily was only 12 years old when she had to save her grandfathers life unexpectedly, before the freak accident happened, she was only “close” with her grandfather, but now they are “really close”.

He had been attacked by bees’ “literally about 50 stings” Emily explained, usually she exaggerates a lot but here she wasn’t even kidding in the slightest bit!

Her grandfather was outside mowing and without realizing it ran over a bee’s nest in the ground while moving. Emily and her grandma were inside, Emily was on the phone with her best friend Kayla. The phone beeped and she switched over calls, it was her grandfather. “I easily could have ignored the call. But I’m glad I didn’t.” Emily said, she continued saying “ It was on the home phone so I had no way of knowing who was calling.” Which just shows how lucky she was to actually answer the beep in her ear.

“All I heard was a faint distressed whisper of “Help…Emily…get grandma…” she said thinking back to this scary incident in her life.

Emily beeped back over to Kayla and said “hey I think something is wrong, I’ll call you later. Then hung up.” Kayla said.

“She sounded kind of confused and scared at the same time” Kayla said, referring to when Emily beeped back into her phone call.

Emily screamed for her grandma and they went running outside. Her grandma was a nurse so she made him sit up and tried to stabilize him until the ambulance came “which was really fast” Emily added.

Although Emily doesn’t remember what exact physical condition her grandpa was in all she could remember is “he was in bad shape.”

While her grandpa was in the hospital the EMT’s told them “if Emily was even a minute later, he may have lost his life.” said her grandma.

Emily did call Kayla back a few hours later and “She was still freaked out and I’m pretty sure she got emotional when she started explaining it” Kayla said.

During the interview Emily kept saying how “traumatic” and “scared” she was, all she could do was bawl her eyes out when she saw her grandpa and during the whole ordeal.

“My grandpa is so allergic to bees’ that he even temporarily lose his eye sight”

Her grandpa is alive and healthy today because of her and even though this happened 6 years ago, Emily still remembers this traumatic event as if it happened yesterday. Some may think this isn’t that big of a deal event in ones life compared to some events in other peoples lives, but to Emily it was pretty scary and she handled it like a champ. And in the process saved a life.



1 Comment so far

  1.   fuglsang on November 10th, 2014

    If this were a different assignment — something other than a profile — the immediacy of the story, the drama, would make for a good story. It doesn’t quite work as a profile, however, Caitlin. The goal of the profile is to reveal something about the subject’s personality. You could do that through showing how a person responds to an emergency, but the action would be secondary to character. The situation you had to work with (phone and Skype interviews) doesn’t help.