There are many heroes around us. For some, it takes several days, months or years for their efforts to bear fruit. For others, it boils down to a decision made in a split second. Anson Lemmer falls in the second category. “I left home a pizza delivery boy and came back as a pizza man,” he says.
When Lemmer, 19, left for work that fateful day, he never imagined that he’d end up saving a man’s life. He never imagined his own life would change as a result of the choice he made when he was much younger.
Lemmer’s evening at work was like any other. He was just about to clock out and was making his last pizza delivery for the night. He pulled up to the customer’s house and immediately knew that something was wrong.
There was a man lying on the front lawn. “His eyes rolled back up into his head,” the teen recalls. “He didn’t respond to any efforts to wake him. I knew then that there was a really serious problem.”
Lemmer wasn’t alone at the scene. There were two friends of the customer trying to assist him when Lemmer arrived. One of them was on the phone calling 911 for assistance. The other was attempting to revive the customer. “As soon as I got to the scene, the friend attempting CPR asked me if I knew how to do CPR,” Lemmer says.
Luckily, Lemmer had learned how to perform CPR when he was much younger. “I didn’t think twice about it,” Lemmer says. He sprang into action and begun to perform CPR on the customer. It didn’t take long for Lemmer to revive the man. An emergency medical team arrived shortly thereafter and took over from Lemmer. The man was then rushed to a nearby hospital and was reported to be walking around soon thereafter.
“Saving lives isn’t in my job description as a pizza delivery boy, but I was sure glad to do it,” says the Pizza delivery boy who became a “Pizza man” as a result. The friends of the man he saved were certainly impressed by the “pizza man’s” quick thinking. “They shook my hand and gave me a really big tip,” says Lemmer. They also let him take the pizza with him after paying for it.
All in all, it was a successful evening for Pizza Man.
