When Josie Darrah participated in a recent CPR training at Powell High School, she knew it was a skill she might need some day.

But she had no idea that “some day” would come only a couple of weeks later.

Darrah was one of the students in Kandi Bennett’s health class who were taught CPR on May 10 by Dr. Adam Childers, an emergency room doctor and hospitalist at Powell Valley Hospital, with the help of EMT LaVonne McNabb.

Last week, Darrah, who will be a junior this fall, was vacationing on the Grand Cayman Island with her family and a couple of friends. She and her friends were playing beach volleyball when they heard a man scream and saw him carrying a woman out of the water.

The woman, who had a medical condition, had lost consciousness under the water.

“They think she just blacked out under the water,” Darrah said. “She was completely limp.” The man who was carrying the woman was her husband of one week.

“They were just married,” she said.

The husband laid his unconscious bride on the beach, and “a lady started doing chest compressions, but she wasn’t doing them correctly,” Darrah said.

Darrah and her friend Aspen Aguirre, who is trained as a lifeguard, took turns doing CPR, and they kept it up for about 15 minutes — long enough for help to arrive with a defibrillator.

Use of the defibrillator started the woman’s heart again, and she was transported to a hospital for follow-up care.

“Me and my friend were the only ones who really knew what to do” with CPR, Darrah said. “She was a lifeguard, so she was already trained, (and) I had taken that CPR class like two weeks ago, so it was pretty fresh in my mind.”

Unfortunately, the woman died the next day, “but we kept her alive that whole day,” Darrah said.

Childers said it’s not unusual for a person to die after being resuscitated following a drowning. “With drowning patients, it is particularly difficult sometimes,” Childers said. “They usually count it as a drowning if they die in the first 24 hours afterward.”

What is unusual is being able to resuscitate a drowning victim at all, he said.

Even though the woman eventually died, Childers said he counts this as a success story.

“She’s still the hero, because she stepped up ... and she responded appropriately,” Childers said. “She did everything right. She revived the person, which is somewhat rare in and of itself. She had the opportunity to show that she could overcome difficult challenges and succeed.”

Darrah, daughter of former Powell Fire Chief Joey Darrah, said she didn’t have time to think about what was happening at the time; she just had to act.

“It just kind of came to me,” she said. “Dad was fire chief for so long, I was kind of used to the stress, I guess.”

Childers said he tells his young students, “The difference between a zero and a hero is, ‘Did I try?’ ... If you know what to do, you start — you be in charge.

“If we’ve all done our best, that’s all that’s in our power to do. The rest is out of our hands. (But) If we don’t ever try, then we’re kind of stuck with that: What would have happened if I had done something?” he said.

Reviving someone often provides a chance for closure for the family, even if that person dies later, Childers said. 

“Sometimes the important part is for the family to have that last time to say goodbye,” he said.

But that can’t happen unless someone gets the needed training and steps up when they’re needed, he said.

“This is a great example of the importance of teaching everybody lifesaving skills, no matter how young they are,” Childers said. “You’ve got a beach full of grownups watching two teenage girls (doing CPR). They deserve all the credit in the world for doing an awesome job.”