Tiffany Lehman stands as a shining example of what a nursing home nurse can do when faced with an emergency situation.
Lehman was the right person, in the right place, with the right amount of guts to step forward and save a baby’s life in late April while descending in flight outside of Dallas.
She’s also the director of nursing at the Healthcare Resort of Wichita, a skilled nursing and assisted living facility in Wichita, KS, run by Mission Health Communities.
Lehman, RN, BSN, has been featured in national publications such as USA Today and broadcasts including “Inside Edition.” There also have been local broadcasts and newspapers across Kansas and Texas, and numerous online outlets. In short, too many to count.
And why not? It’s not every day a complete stranger helps out another when the latter’s 11-month-old baby is burning with a 104-degree fever and flailing in the middle of a seven-and-a-half-minute seizure. Yet that was exactly what Lehman, a former ED-ICU nurse, did after she and boyfriend Alvin Dodson sprang to action.
Paramedics were at the gate when the airplane landed and whisked mother and child away to Baylor Regional Medical Center. Doctors there tended to the baby and theorized a virus had caused the near-fatal encounter.
Someone on the plane apparently alerted the local Fox TV station and that led to an interview with the baby’s mother. Lehman and Dodson learned of it and then reached out to her through Facebook a few days later. The grateful mother then shared their identities, which led to the media barrage.
“Tiffany is a rock star,” the mother, Janay Flowers, told Yahoo Lifestyle. “God put us together.”
“There are emergency situations all the time,” Lehman humbly told me. “Patients code and die, they have accidents. The only difference between us and hospital nurses is we don’t have a doctor on hand all the time, 24 hours a day. We have to have more independence and critical thinking abilities than hospital nurses.”
Selfless, lifesaving action deserves a happy postlude. Lehman could have looked the other way, but she chose not to.
“I think sometimes you have to put all that aside and remember we’re first-responders,” she said. “And when somebody’s in trouble, you have to help. That’s your God-given talent and you have to use it.”
From the June 6, 2019 Issue of McKnight's Long-Term Care News
