Illinois girl's keen hearing credited with saving neighbor - Associated Press

CHICAGO (AP) — A suburban Chicago girl who has hypersensitive hearing is credited with saving the life of a neighbor after she slipped and fell on ice last winter and became trapped beneath a car.

Kasey Brislane, a 13-year-old who is a Girl Scout Cadette, received the organization’s Medal of Honor on Sunday for saving Susi Schubert, 68. The national award is given to Girl Scouts who save another’s life, WLS-TV reported.

Brislane said that in January she was watching TV when she started to notice the faint sound of someone yelling for help outside her family’s home in the Cook County village of Harwood Heights.

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She ran outside and found Schubert, her neighbor of eight years, wedged underneath a car following a fall. Schubert’s face was beneath the tailpipe, and she’d broken an arm and twisted her legs on top of the ice.

“I’m screaming for anybody, just anybody, help me. Kasey heard me and she came running out,” Schubert told the Pioneer Press.

Schubert said that when the paramedics arrived, she was so cold they couldn’t give her medication through an IV until she warmed up.

“Kasey wouldn’t leave my side. That little girl, I’m telling you, she’s my guardian angel,” Schubert said. “She saved me, she really did, or I’d have probably still been out there until I froze. Nobody heard me except Kasey.”

After the accident, other neighbors brought Schubert cookies and checked in on her. All of them said they didn’t hear anything the night that she fell and became trapped.

Last year, Brislane was diagnosed with autism and started to receive occupational therapy, sometimes wearing noise-canceling headphones so the sounds of the world are bearable for her hypersensitive hearing.

Her mother, Lisa Brislane, said her daughter was embarrassed by the diagnosis at first but has gradually come to accept it.

“I finally feel like I did something that people are going to remember when I die,” Kasey Brislane said. “People are going to say, that was the girl that saved someone’s life because of her autism. I want people to know that autism is more than just ‘Rain Man.’”