(UpMatter) – At first, Mario Calabria thought it was a joke. The whole family was mountain biking on the Tech Trails, riding slowly on a flat part of the trail, when his father suddenly fell off his bike, hitting a tree as he slumped to the ground.
Mark Calabria was a fit 56 and an active outdoorsman. “I thought he was messing with us, pretending to be someone who didn’t know how to ride a bike,” Mario recalls.
Then the fourth-year mechanical engineering student at Michigan Technological University noticed that his father’s eyes had rolled back into his head.
As his younger sisters screamed, Mario transformed into something he had spent 224 hours training to become: an emergency medical technician. Within 30 seconds, he had his brother’s girlfriend calling 911; he found a map posted on a tree and identified exactly where on the Trails they were; he called Travis Pierce, assistant director of the Michigan Tech Emergency Medical Services (as well as Mario’s mentor and friend). Within two minutes, he had checked his father’s pulse, found that he didn’t have one, flipped him over and started cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
As he compressed his father’s chest, he kept saying, “I love you, Pops. Stay with me.”
After about three minutes of CPR, Mark Calabria started breathing. “We got him back; we got him back,” Mario exclaimed to his mother, Marie, who had been helping her husband try to breathe.
