Nicole Edison was travelling home to Barrie earlier this month with her mother when she noticed something was off.
The pair was headed back from Ottawa on Highway 401 with their aunt and uncle, when Edison saw her mother – Karen Begbie – slump over.
“I thought she had fallen asleep, so I looked at her and her body was convulsing.”
They quickly pulled over to the side of the highway west of Belleville and started waving down vehicles. Of the 15 people who stopped to help seven were nurse, two paramedics and one was a fire chief.
They immediately began CPR.
“I just kept saying, ‘is she breathing? Is she breathing?’ and they said, ‘no, but she has angels all around her.’”
Begbie had suffered a rare form of cardiac arrest, where her heart beat got out of rhythm and stopped.
Begbie went three minutes without oxygen. Had she gone any longer, doctors say it could have led to brain damage.
"I just kept saying to the nurses, “I'm just not ready to lose my mom. Please, I’m just not ready to lose her.’"
Thanks to those off-duty first responders Begbie is just fine.
“The day I got out of the hospital and could see the sky, and the trees, and the birds – just to breathe the air, it was like, you know what every single day now, you wake up and live your life to the fullest,” Begbie says.
The pair is now getting the chance to say thank you. Edison was able to track down all of those first responders through social media and has scheduled a meet up.
"She called Gina, the woman who did CPR, immediately,” says Begbie.
In a few weeks, many of them will be travelling to Barrie to meet her again, this time under better circumstances.
“They are truly my angels. Truly my heroes."
