An 11-year-old South Carolina boy having an asthma attack told his mother, "I'm dying," and then stopped breathing, the Orange County Register reports.
If not for a doctor nearby, Teigue "Tiger" Winge of Powdersville may have never said another word.
Amir Yazdan, a part-time ER physician from Irvine, Calif., happened to be taking pictures of his new car near where Tiger's mom, Marjie Britz, had pulled over on a rural road in South Carolina on New Year's Eve.
He heard the mother's screams for help and sprang into action. He began performing CPR on Tiger, breathing the inhaler drug albuterol into the child's airway, the Register reports.
Yazdan estimated Tiger's heart had stopped beating a minute or so before he arrived. Yazdan told Greenville Online the boy had turned blue and was in full cardiac arrest.
“He was dead,” Yazdan told the Register. “Completely lifeless. I really did not think he was going to come back.”
According to CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, about two more minutes passed without signs of life.
Eventually, Tiger's heart started to beat, and he took a breath on his own. An ambulance arrived 10 minutes later, and Tiger began breathing regularly on his own at the hospital.
"When I woke up, I was in the hospital," Tiger told WSPA. "Everything was blurry and all I could think of was, 'Who are you, where am I -- and what is stuck on my arm?'”
Yazdan said he didn't even think twice.
“It wasn’t an option for me to let this kid go," he told WSPA.
Britz, who's a professor at Clemson University, told USA Today there was no doubt that Yazdan saved her boy.
"What do you give a person who has given back your whole world?" Britz told USA Today. "It's just a Christmas miracle, delayed."