A group of strangers stepped in when a dad-of-two collapsed outside a restaurant.
Colin Fyles was walking to Paint and Paper in Birkdale village on Wednesday, June 8 to get decorating supplies for his granddaughter's bedroom when he suddenly collapsed. As the 79-year-old hit the floor, strangers surrounded him and started to give him CPR, with one off-duty nurse leading the life-saving first aid on the scene.
The former physics teacher suffered a cardiac arrest after he left his wife to get the bus to Southport town centre, as she went past on the bus she saw chaos unfolding but couldn't tell it was her husband. Eileen Fyles, 75, began ringing her husband when she got off the bus but when there was no answer it dawned on her that the man on the floor receiving treatment was in fact her husband.
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Eventually, a doctor at Southport A&E answered, her daughter, Catherine Neilson, has revealed. When speaking to the ECHO, Catherine revealed that her dad was a fit 79-year-old who you wouldn't have expected to have collapsed in the street.
She said: "It feels absolutely amazing to have these people help my dad because I don't know if I would risk trying to do CPR on somebody. I don't know what I'm doing and I don't know if the people that stopped to help immediately had any medical training, just loads of people rushed over to him and started trying to do things to him straight away.
"It's a mixture of that and the nurse, Amy, coming along who was medically trained, and also the fact that there is a number of defibrillators in Birkdale Village. It's just as well it happened where it did and everybody did what they did. We're just so grateful to them as you can imagine."
Catherine, 48, also explained that it was nurse Amy Thornton who was key to her dad being alive today. She said: "The people from Croziers phoned the owner who is a nurse and she dashed down but by the time she got there Amy Thornton, the nurse who helped my dad, was already there and people were rushing to get a defibrillator. People just decided to be amazing."
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