KANNAPOLIS, N.C. – It was an ordinary Thursday afternoon at the Kwik Mart for clerk Kaye Austin when Wanda Welch and her children, Kendal Bumgarner, 10, and Alex Bumgarner, 11, stopped by for a snack, the Independent Tribune reports.

The children bought candy while Welch went to wash her hands in the bathroom. Alex went to tell their mother they were finished when his sister started wheezing.

"I said, 'Kendal, stop playing, it's not funny to pretend you're choking,'" Alex told the newspaper. "Then I realized she wasn't playing."

Alex yelled for his mother, who ran out of the bathroom. Kendal started toward her mother, still wheezing. Austin, at work in the back of the store, heard the child struggle to breathe. A former certified nurse's assistant, Austin knew how to perform the Heimlich maneuver.

"I came out and put my arms around her, and turned her around and squeezed," Austin said. "When it didn't work the first time, I did it again and she started breathing again. … When I called my son later that day, I told him what happened," Austin told the newspaper. "He said, 'Mom you were already my hero, but now you're someone else's.'"