The sirens echoed from miles away. But through the hills, it sounded like they would arrive at any second. “Any second now,” Anthony Lange kept thinking.
The thud had come from behind about five minutes earlier. Anthony and his dad’s usual lineup of basketball buddies were all facing the hoop, as one of the Wednesday-night regulars went in for a layup. No one saw if the shot dropped, just Colin Olson collapsed on the court floor.
Anthony, the youngest of most the bystanders by a good 20 years, was the first to respond — rolling Olson onto his back, rubbing clenched knuckles on the sternum to see if he would respond to pain, checking if there was a pulse: Nothing.
“I panicked for the first 10 seconds of realizing that his heart stopped beating,” Anthony says. He’s almost certain he put his hands in the air and swore in disbelief. “But then, I don’t know, something kicked in. I stopped thinking and I just kind of did it.”
Today, Anthony is a senior at UW–Madison double majoring in biology and pharmtox (pharmacology and toxicology). But this life-changing event happened in the summer of 2023, when he was in the wake of his freshman year and had just become a certified nursing assistant (CNA). Nineteen-year-old Anthony knew what to do and immediately started emergency cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
“He knew what he needed to do, and he really didn’t miss a beat,” says Anthony’s mom, Deborah Lange. “I didn’t get down there right away, I was in the house, and they were all down at the shed. If Anthony hadn’t been there and he hadn’t done what he did right away, Colin could not have been getting oxygen to his vital organs and would have certainly died.”
Deborah came sprinting out of the house about five minutes post-thud, spotting Anthony before she could even get through the open door of their handmade basketball “shed.” He was hunched over Olson, rhythmically thumping his chest and dripping in sweat. As Deborah scrambled to the glossy floor, she caught a wave of her son’s composure.
“I saw that he was calm,” she says. “I think his ability to control that situation kept everyone else calm, because you would expect at least somebody would have lost it, but nobody lost focus on what needed to be done.”
Both CPR certified, the two began working together — Deborah doing chest compressions and counting out loud so that Anthony could give rescue breaths every 10 compressions — as Olson slowly grew colder, and his skin turned a deeper purple.
The sound of sirens began to rise in the distance. It was another 10 minutes of seconds.
“I remember thinking we’re not going to fail. We aren’t going to fail at this. We couldn’t …” choked Deborah.
Paramedics arrived with a swarm of emergency vehicles, sweeping Olson down the drive and into the darkness with one fell swoop and a lingering echo.
“The doctors say he cheated death,” Deborah says. “They say there’s no way he beat the odds. The fact that he survived and we live outside of town, so far from a hospital, it’s really amazing. It’s a miracle that he made it.”
The Lange family lives on the outskirts of Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, 30 miles from the nearest hospital. What they did was against all odds, though at the time, they didn’t know just how much. There were 400 cardiac calls to 911 in the Dane County Area that year, and a total of 40 survived.
“It felt like I was in the right spot at the right time. It was an unfortunate situation, but having that responsibility just felt right,” Anthony says. “I had never even thought about going into emergency medicine, until I witnessed someone almost die. I took a couple weeks to reflect on everything, and it felt like my life was being steered toward this career path.”
Anthony is set to graduate this spring and on track to become an emergency department physician. He works as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) and volunteers at Our Lady of Hope Clinic — one of only two clinics in the United States that is entirely run off donations and member patients, making accessible healthcare a reality for the uninsured.
“It feels so great to be helping people in their worst times. Every time I work in a clinical sense, it just affirms why I’m doing it in the first place,” Anthony says. “It makes me feel super useful in a sense, and the impact that it has, I can’t describe how awesome it feels.”
The months spent studying for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) in a cubicle-sized, shared bedroom were not nearly as invigorating. But it paid off, and it was Olson that pulled him through.
“I try and get dinner with him once a month,” Anthony says. “We chat about things going on in our lives, what’s new, and things we’re excited for. We don’t really ever dwell on that day, because it gets pretty emotional if we start talking about it again.”
Meeting Olson’s family, about a year after the incident in the summer of 2024, was more than emotional. It was more than words could express.
It was a cascade of hugs that met Anthony the moment he arrived at the Madison Mallards ballpark. It was the event itself — Dane County’s annual Survivor Celebration — that had everybody sobbing. It was an extra-long squeeze from Olson’s son and his sisters’ instinctive, heartfelt reach for Anthony throughout the day.
“That’s the most emotional I’ve ever felt in my life, I was crying my eyes out,” Anthony says. “Each one of them said how thankful they were for me, and it felt like … I don’t know, it’s hard to describe that feeling. But it definitely didn’t feel like I deserved any of it, I just happened to be there that night.”
Olson, who has done everything in his power to express his gratitude, would disagree with Anthony on that last part. They don’t dwell on it, but that Wednesday night changed both of their lives. It echoes in Olson’s family, in Anthony’s vocational impact, in the lifelong bond the two of them share. Any day now, as their monthly tradition continues, they’ll be chatting about medical school over dinner.