BARDSTOWN, Ky. — As a cold breeze came through Kentucky Monday, a lot of us looked forward to the spring and summer ahead. Well, Lauren McCubbins makes her own.
"My greenhouse is about 80 degrees on a regular basis," she said, standing in her oasis. It's a respite, and it's a necessity.
"It is," McCubbins said. "I come in here and I can put my air pods in and I go to work and I don't have to worry for a second."
She tends to browning leaves, and in turn, they keep her going.
"They come in and they look dead but when you start watering them they turn green," she said. "They take off."
The McCubbins smiling and laughing, surrounded by leaves and flowers, is miles away from the woman WHAS11 met three months ago.
Through tears, she explained, "I felt like my heart was gone."
Her son Landon McCubbins choked on a bouncy ball at Boston School. Teachers, first responders and staff at the hospital were unable to save him.
"I watched them perform CPR on my son in the classroom," McCubbins said.
Landon died a few hours later.
When WHAS11 first spoke with Landon's mom, the day after he died, she put it simply: "They tried everything."
Now, she says schools should be better equipped to handle the situation. They should have a device like LifeVac.
It's an FDA-registered device used that's similar to a plunger. You place it over the person's face, push in to release air out the side, then pull.
Arthur Lih, inventor and CEO of LifeVac, came to Bardstown Monday to meet McCubbins and talk with WHAS11 News about the device.
"We have saved over 600 lives, we have saved over 400 children, we're in thousands of schools, we have saved children in school," he said.
Lih invented the device after seeing a 7-year-old had choked and died; his own daughter was also 7 years old at the time.
Eleven years later, McCubbins saw videos of emergencies just like Landon's. But in these videos, the children lived, and their parents used LifeVac.
"If [the school] had the LifeVac, who knows, it could have saved him," she said. "I could still have my 8-year-old."
She's pushing for more schools and parents to keep the device on hand. While some districts in Kentucky already have it, many do not.
"He was going to do big things. And maybe he is still going to do big things and that is why I am talking about it," she said. "Because he deserved better."
Just like the flowers blooming from the ground of her greenhouse, a reminder of last year's harvest, McCubbins hopes her son's story can bring life, even in death.
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