How a manager at Mesero in Dallas saved a choking diner's life

Hungry from a day spent traveling with not much time to eat, Jodee Chizever went to Mesero Inwood Village in Dallas on Wednesday night and took a seat in a back booth. In Dallas for the first time on a business trip from New Jersey, she talked and laughed with her friends and sister, when suddenly, around 8 p.m., she lost her breath: A bite gone wrong and she couldn't breathe.

Her waiter saw her choking and ran to get Angel Cabrera, the store manager. All managers at Mesero must have training in the Heimlich maneuver, which Cabrera learned for the first time when volunteering at a hospital in Mexico while in high school nearly a decade and a half ago.

Chizever gestured to her throat and chest and hit her hands on the table to get attention, and her sister pounded on her back and chest to no avail. Cabrera rushed over.

"By, this time, to be honest, I had no idea what was happening. Everything went black, and somewhere in the back I heard some man saying, 'you need to stand up,' but I couldn’t," Chizever says. "I felt myself fading. It was the most bizarre feeling."

Cabrera lifted her and performed the Heimlich maneuver, also called abdominal thrusts, twice before he felt her relax as she began breathing again.

"I realized at that moment that my feet were shaking because I was nervous, too," Cabrera said via email. Amid being hailed as a hero by other customers and employees, he collected his thoughts and said a prayer of thankfulness.

Though she said it felt like "forever," Chizever's friends said the incident occurred in an instant. Choking can escalate quickly and become dire: More than 5,000 people died of choking in 2015, according to the National Security Council.

Naturally, Chizever was extremely thankful for Cabrera's intervention. She said she felt tears in her eyes in her state of shock, then realized she wanted to do something for Cabrera. "What do you do for someone that literally just saved my life?" she thought. As a stylist for men's custom clothing brand J.Hilburn, she decided to offer Cabrera a custom fitting and a gift of the clothes of his choice.

Chizever posted about her experience on Facebook, and when her company's COO saw the post, they offered to pay for Cabrera's gift.

Before leaving the restaurant, Chizever gave Cabrera one more hug and expressed her gratitude again.

"He was so humble and sweet. He was like, 'It's OK, no problem,'" she says. "I was like, 'No problem? You just saved my life!'"

Cabrera has used the Heimlich once before, when a 6-year-old family friend was choking about 12 years ago. "I first learned Heimlich because my mother made me take those classes at the hospital, and I'm thankful," he says. "It makes me realize how important the life lessons are you give your kids, and activities you have them get involved in, like this, could one day save someone's life."