PITTSBURGH — Life is coming full circle for a Pitt soccer player who keeps making headlines this year.
Junior Ellie Breech just set the school record for most wins by a women’s soccer goalie, but her biggest honor this past year was saving her father when he suffered cardiac arrest.
“Whenever you’re on the field, you leave it all out there, and even for your family, you have to leave it all out there too,” she told Channel 11.
Breech left it all out there for her dad on Christmas Day. When Ed Breech went into cardiac arrest, she performed CPR for nine strenuous minutes, saving his life.
“As scary as it was seeing your dad on the brink of death and super, super close to never having him again, you kind of have to put that aside or else nothing will get done,” she said of her concentration in those moments.
CPR was fresh in Breech’s mind. Just weeks prior, she took a CPR certification course for Pitt athletes. It was inspired by Damar Hamlin and led by UPMC’s Dr. Sylvia Owusu-Ansah.
Owusu-Ansah recalls learning that Breech’s training saved a life.
“I was speechless,” she said. “Then I started crying, and then I said to myself we’re justified in doing this.”
Today, Ed Breech is thriving and back to work as an ICU nurse.
“The first thing he said when he woke up was, ‘Thank you for saving my life,’” Breech recalls. “I’ll never forget him saying those words.”
They are words that played a role in changing Breech’s path.
At the time of the incident, she was an engineering major. Now, she’s following her father into medicine.
“I joke about it with him all the time, like Dad, if you wanted me to go into the medical field, you didn’t have to do all this,” she said with a smile.
Breech has since worked closely with Owusu-Ansah, leading a CPR demonstration in the spring and shadowing her at UPMC Children’s Hospital over the summer.
Now on track for a career in saving lives, Breech wants to spread the word that it doesn’t take much to learn how to save a life yourself.
“You might get a little annoyed of a 30-minute CPR training either before training, before work, just randomly squeezed into your day, but you will never regret having the possibility to save someone’s life.”
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