The First Life

In June 2016, a small care home in Dyfed, Wales changed everything.

Allt-y-Mynydd had been through a painful few months. Earlier that year, the home had lost a resident to choking. It was the kind of tragedy that leaves a mark on a care team. So when they heard about a new device called LifeVac, they ordered one. It arrived on a Friday.

Two days later, during lunchtime, another resident began to choke.

Staff responded immediately. They followed the protocol they had been trained to follow. Back blows. Again. Again. The obstruction would not shift. The resident's condition was deteriorating.

Then a nurse on duty reached for the LifeVac.

On the first application, the airway cleared.

The resident survived.

When Arthur Lih, the inventor of LifeVac, received the call that day, he was at home with his daughter. He turned to her and said: "We saved our first life."

Then he found out the name of the nurse who had used the device.

Her name was Jackie. The same name as his daughter. The same name that had inspired him to build LifeVac in the first place, after he had stood in a hospital corridor years earlier and imagined a seven-year-old boy who had died from choking on a grape, and pictured his own little girl in his place.

He called it a God wink.

Arthur had spent years trying to get LifeVac into schools, nursing homes, and emergency vehicles. Progress had been slow. Funding was tight. Scepticism was everywhere. There were moments when the weight of it all could have been enough to stop him.

But on that Friday afternoon in Wales, a care home had said yes. And two days later, a nurse named Jackie had saved a life with the device he had built for a daughter named Jackie.

That was ten years ago.

Since that afternoon in Dyfed, LifeVac has been used in over 5,987 documented emergencies. The faces of those survivors cover the walls of the LifeVac Hall of Saves, floor to ceiling, from babies to grandparents, from care homes to family kitchens.

Every single one of them started with that first yes.