Driver saves boy from choking
Two days after Malcolm Wayman completed his St John first-aid course, he saved a child’s life on the side of a road near Wellington.
It was mid-morning on a very recent Friday, and Wayman had picked up a load of scrap for Sims Pacific Metals and tracked back down the hill towards Lower Hutt.
A white hatchback was in front of him. A woman, driving the car, appeared to be screaming and shaking a child in the front seat.
Not sure what was going on, he kept an eye on the vehicle and followed as it turned off the hill on to Gracefield Rd, Seaview.
The woman quickly pulled into a driveway on the left, jumped out of the car and grabbed the boy. He was limp in her arms.
‘‘She just started screaming and screaming: ‘Help me, help me, help me! My boy’s not breathing’,’’ Wayman said as he choked back tears.
He pulled over and sprung into action – just two days after he had finished the St John one-day course.
‘‘I just took the child, checked his airway.’’ Something was lodged in the 4-year-old’s throat. It was out of reach.
The toddler had begun to turn blue. ‘‘I can [still] see his face.’’
Wayman knelt down and laid the blond boy face-down across his left knee, then slapped his back five times, checking the boy each time.
Remembering the chest thrust he was taught on the course, he compressed the child once but nothing happened.
‘‘The second time, a marble shot out and then he did a big gasp and started crying and asking for his mum.’’
The boy’s name was Ben, Wayman found out later. He stayed and checked on the boy’s mother and told her to ring an ambulance. She was ecstatic, thanking Wayman and hugging her child.
‘‘I didn’t even think about it. Other than, ‘this boy isn’t breathing and I’ve got to do something’.
‘‘If I had thought about it I probably would have gone to pieces.’’
The moment seemed like days but ‘‘it was probably just five minutes’’, Wayman said.
It was fortunate, he said, because the first-aid training was fresh in his mind having last completed a military course about 40 years ago.
A refresher had been on the cards for a few years.
So, he jumped at the chance when his employer offered it.
‘‘I think the Government should make it [first aid] compulsory for everyone.
‘‘I think if more people did it, there’d be less deaths, and it would probably help the hospitals as well.’’
St John, Wellington first aid senior tutor Margaret Smith said 82,000 people were trained last year. She said knowing people had the skills to assist friends, family and strangers in an emergency was invaluable to the community.
Wayman said he never got the chance to ask the little boy’s mother for her name. He hoped to meet her again one day. ●➤ The St John annual appeal runs from today until April 8. It helps support programmes like St John in Schools.