When Sean Scro, a rising sophomore at Salem High, got his lifeguard certification in June, it was partially because friends Alex and Claire Hart didn’t want to go on their own “because it’s lame,” Scro said. He also landed a job at the Hidden Valley Country Club as a lifeguard for the summer.

A little over a month later, when Sean saved his grandmother’s life by performing CPR after she suffered a heart attack in her home in Pennsylvania, it wasn’t so lame anymore.

On July 7, Sean, his brother Connor, and his parents Steve and Siobhan were getting ready to leave his grandmother Barbara Scro’s house in Pennsylvania. They’d visited and she was writing a check for a bill she wanted them to drop in the mail when she said she was dizzy and collapsed.

Sean's grandmother Barbara and late grandfather Maurice Scro. He passed three months before Barbara's heart attack.

“I didn’t know what had happened at first until my dad said ‘Come in here and do CPR,” Sean said. But he jumped in, with Barbara purple-faced and sputtering with no pulse.

“Adrenaline just took over and everything kind of comes back to you when you’re in a clutch like that,” Sean said. He did the compressions and Steve took over the mouth-to-mouth for ten minutes until the paramedics arrived. The EMTs shocked her with a defibrillator twice and intubated her at the house before they took her to the hospital.

Two days later, the 78-year-old heart attack victim woke up and began her miraculous recovery, with a few problems recovering her short-term memory.

“The fact at how well my grandmother recovered is just amazing to me,” Sean said. “They said it was because we reacted in the first 30 seconds of her having the attack.” As of late August, she was just moved into assisted living and the doctors say she may be able to live independently again.

“It’s kind of a life-changing experience,” he said. Sean already had plans for entering the medical field later on in life. “I’ll know I’ll be able to do it if I ever have to again.”