(South Bend, IN) - A New Prairie High School freshman wasted no time putting her newly-learned lifesaving skills to good use.

Last month, Valeria Markiewicz was at a South Bend restaurant with her family celebrating her mother’s birthday when a man nearby started choking. Some people these days would get out their cameras and start filming, but Valerie jumped to action. “No one was sure what to do, so I ran over there,” she told HTNN.

Markiewicz said she calmly pushed her way into the situation and performed the Heimlich maneuver until the food the victim was choking on, came up. “I just grabbed him and started performing everything that my teacher taught me,” she said.

She said she just became CPR certified in her biomedicine class last semester. Valeria was pretty matter-of-fact about why she did it.

“I always think, if that was my brother or one of my family members, I’d like them to be saved if I wasn’t there,” she said. “I wanted him to be safe, I wanted to make sure he was okay. Because he has a family waiting for him. You don’t want something to happen to your family member, so I just took action; I ran over there and helped.”

Not surprisingly, Valeria says she intends to pursue a career in medicine and maybe become a doctor someday.