Prepared for Anything

In January 2024, Nathan and his wife Brooke, joined their parents, Jeff and Crystal Welch and Harry and Kelli Estep, for a family vacation at The Greenbrier.

They had a dinner reservation at a nearby restaurant one evening and stood in the resort’s main lobby waiting for the rest of their dinner party to arrive.

Nathan remembered his training from the American Heart Association and assessed the situation, called for someone to bring an AED and for someone else to call 911, while he checked Tom’s vital signs.

When he tried to see if Tom was responsive, to no avail, and couldn’t find a pulse.

Nathan immediately started doing chest compressions on Tom.

“I counted my compressions out loud and by 17 or 18 my mom who’s also a nurse and Marshall grad, Crystal, arrived,” Nathan said. “After my initial round of compressions, she gave the two breaths, and we continued the process for three cycles.”

After three rounds, Tom jerked awake and started coughing.

Thankfully, an emergency medicine physician recently completed fellowship at Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, Grace Landers, was also on the scene by then, and helped Nathan and Crystal keep Tom stable until the ambulance arrived.

The paramedics performed an EKG, which showed Tom had a third-degree heart block, which explained why his heart temporarily stopped.

In the months that followed, Tom ended up getting a pacemaker and making a full recovery.

“I’ve never been able to follow someone after an event like this like I have with Tom and being able to talk to him and hearing about how he has gotten better,” Nathan said. “It’s very rare to be able to resuscitate someone with CPR ‘in the wild’ without all of the necessary supplies you need and the right setting.”

Saving Tom’s life was not the first time Nathan stepped in to help someone in an emergency outside of his typical workday—it was the third.

While still in Marshall’s nursing school and working at the Cabell Huntington Health Department, Nathan and a friend helped a person experiencing a drug overdose by administering Narcan.

Shortly after graduating nursing school and eating dinner with friends at Roosters in Huntington’s Pullman Square, Nathan performed the Heimlich maneuver on another patron who was choking on a chicken wing.

And while helping Tom was the third instance, in July 2026, Nathan and his family were on vacation in Columbia, South Carolina when they noticed a golf cart accident involving children.

Without hesitation, Nathan sprang into action and applied pressure to a child’s head wound until paramedics could arrive.

The confidence Nathan had in himself as a nurse didn’t just appear one day, it’s something that’s grown with him from the time he started nursing school in 2014.

Nathan currently works as the urology coordinator in the Cabell Huntington Hospital operating room (OR). In 2024, he was named the Cabell Huntington Hospital Employee of the Year, in part for rescuing Tom in his time off.

In gratitude for saving his life, Tom and his wife Barbara gave the Marshall University Foundation a $50,000 gift to establish The Welch Family Nursing Scholarship.

“I have an overwhelming sense of gratitude toward Tom and Barbara. I received a private scholarship as a nursing student, and to have one in my honor to help future nursing students is incredible,” Nathan said.

For Nathan, the scholarship means generations of nurses can gain the education and confidence to act when someone needs help.

His advice to future nurses?