On April 25, 2021, Indiana dad Matt Uber was playing a game of tag with his daughter, Vera Posy, when suddenly he heard a thud. He found the 4-year-old balled up on the floor in the corner of one of the rooms in their house and initially assumed that she had fallen down and hit her head. After picking her up from the ground, Uber noticed that Vera’s body had gone limp and her eyes were rolling in the back of her head. She also wasn’t breathing and was starting to turn pale.
In that moment of panic, Uber remembered something he’d seen in an episode of the hit Steve Carell sitcom The Office. In the Season 5 episode “Stress Relief,” which aired on February 1, 2009, Michael Scott (Carell) arranges CPR training for his employees at the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. The whole thing ends up going comically wrong, but at one point, Carell’s character is instructed to perform chest compressions on a dummy to the beat of the Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive.”
Take a look at the full scene below.
“That literally entered into my head, and I’m in my head doing ‘Stayin’ Alive,’” Uber said during an interview with WTHR. The father of four kept the compressions going until the paramedics showed up and took over for him. From there, they used a defibrillator on Vera and were successfully able to revive her. But had it not been for Uber’s quick thinking, she might not have survived the ordeal.
It was later discovered that Vera had a rare, life-threatening heart condition known as calmodulinopathy, for which she was fitted with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator. “We know that every second, every moment that CPR was not initiated, it increased her risk of neurological damage or non-survival,” Vera’s mother, Erin, told Today a few months after the incident. “I would have had tremendous guilt about not being able to do the right thing…had it turned out poorly,” Uber said at the time. “Just take the time to get this foundation. CPR is not a difficult skill, but it can change the world.”
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