Batten down the hatches – the snow is coming!! Well at 5pm when we went to help set up for my cousin’s 18th Birthday the snowflakes were tiny and just created a light dusting.
We’d had the meal that my Aunt had cooked with help from her friend. We’d had lovely pudding. We’d done the quiz and my cousin’s team won. We were about to eat birthday cake when something happened.
At about 10:30ish, one of the girls from the party had been heading home and something happened so she’d come back to the building – a lady had slipped over in the alleyway behind the church and couldn’t get up – they’d called an ambulance but it was so snowy that the ambulance hadn’t got through yet.
Well a bunch of us, grabbed coats jumpers and a blanket and went to offer what help we could. When the ambulance did arrive I was shivering and my hands were hurting as I hadn’t stopped for my gloves or coat, I was in a hoodie and went for it (I know bright spark!)
We were waiting for the ambulance and it was getting to the point that this lady was getting really really cold the adrenaline from hurting herself wasn’t keeping her warm. The coats and blanket etc were just soaking up the snow and not really helping. She made the call that she wanted to get into the wheelchair (her friend had been to borrow it from a neighbour in the hope that she could get the lady into the chair without assistance but the lady couldn’t put weight on her leg and her friend couldn’t take enough of her weight to get her into the chair).
I was on the handle bars leaning on the chair to make sure it didn’t over balance. Various people grabbed a hand or an arm and then did what they could to manpurve the lady into the chair, my uncle then helped me push the chair in the snow for the lady to sit herself down in once we’d got her upright.
We all kept chatting to the lady and thankfully the ambulance arrived not much later. The chap in the ambulance got us to pull the wheelchair backwards round the alley way to the ambulance. I had one side, our “honorary” uncle (he’s the youth leader at my old church and everyone called him Uncle even though only 4 of the youth group were actually his nieces/nephews!) was on the other side and Chris was on the same side as me.
The lady kept saying how lovely we were and how lucky she was that’d we’d been at the church and been able to help and things like that.
My hands were red, very sore and cold and the snow had soaked into my socks (I wasn’t really dressed for snow) but I’m glad that our team of good samaritans were there to help otherwise she’d have been sat in the snow for nearly half an hour if not a bit longer given the amount of snow and how unclear the roads were.
Thank you to the ambulance service – it took some time but they got there and the guy was lovely and friendly.
