A labour and delivery nurse at our Markham Stouffville Hospital site, Lyndsay was on her way to an appointment when suddenly, her car’s auto-brake sensor kicked in, slamming on the brakes out of nowhere. Confused, Lyndsay glanced ahead to see other cars experiencing the same abrupt halt. Initially, she brushed it off as a minor inconvenience, assuming it was probably just some trivial incident on the road.
Continuing onward, however, she noticed scattered debris on the road, cars parked haphazardly, and a general sense of chaos as she approached a familiar intersection. Despite being a regular route for Lyndsay, the scene unfolding was far from ordinary. There were shards of glass, pools of oil, and even blood staining the pavement.
As Lyndsay drew nearer, the severity of the incident became clear. There, in the midst of the wreckage, she saw a body lying motionless on the ground. A bystander was tending to him.
Stepping up to help
Without hesitation, Lyndsay stopped to see if she could lend assistance. The bystander who was taking care of the man pointed to a second individual on the other side of the road who needed assistance. She quickly hurried across the chaotic intersection and found an elderly man with noticeable injuries: a broken nose, head lacerations, fractured sternum, and bleeding. As she began assessing him, his condition deteriorated rapidly, and he was slipping out of consciousness, and became unresponsive. Recognizing the urgency, Lyndsay immediately got the man onto the ground in the event that she needed to start compressions. Upon laying the man on the ground Lyndsay was still able to find a pulse and the man began to slowly regain consciousness.
“A part of me was thinking, I’m not an emergency nurse. It’s not my area of expertise,” Lyndsay recalls. “But then, I thought, I’m a nurse. Does it matter? I just have to trust the skills and the knowledge I have from my education.”
The elderly man was understandably distressed and confused and was unable to provide the contact information for a family member. As they waited for the emergency responders, the man asked Lyndsay not to leave his side. Lyndsay not only stayed with the man, but when the ambulance arrived, she also followed them to the hospital and helped the team in the emergency department care for him until the situation was under control.
“What kept going through my mind was, what if this was my dad?” Lyndsay recounts. “If I knew there was a nurse there, someone to advocate for him or just offer reassurance, I know how much I would have appreciated that.”
Uxbridge is a tight-knit community where our staff often demonstrate our honoured to care culture beyond the walls of the hospital. Lyndsay, who is a resident of Uxbridge, exemplifies how we live our core values including compassion and commitment.
Even now, whenever Lyndsay drives past the intersection on her way to work, she thinks about that fateful day when she happened to be in the right place at the right time.
“I feel honoured to have been able to do my part when help was needed. It’s certainly something I will never forget.”
