Irishwoman's Diary

The following is a true story. Names have been changed to protect identities - well, really one name has been altered to save the blushes of the shy heroine of our story. Let's call her Nellie.

Some years ago Nellie, who lives in Dublin, was on the bus into town shortly before Christmas. It was the morning rush-hour, and the bus was packed with shoppers and employees on their way to work. Nellie was looking out the window, vaguely thinking about her job and when she could get time off to do her own shopping, when suddenly she became aware of a commotion in the seats in front of her.

People were leaning over a child who appeared to be in a dead faint. The girl, about 10 year of age, was lying half on the seat and half across her mother, who was very anxiously slapping her back. Other passengers were leaning in, vainly trying to help. One was flapping a newspaper over the child's face.

Choked on sweet

The youngster - Nellie thinks her name might have been Grainne - had collapsed after choking on a sweet and making repeated efforts to cough it up. Her mother had tried to dislodge it herself, without success. The child's pallor was ghostly.

Nellie realised the girl was in real danger and got up from her seat to go to the bus driver and tell him to radio for an ambulance. But as she pushed past standing passengers her move was mistakenly interpreted and she never got as far as the driver. It is a moment she still ponders on and wonders at.

The desperate mother interpreted Nellie's movement as that of somebody who knew what she was doing, for she practically threw the child at her. She thought Nellie was a medical expert of some sort. Dumbfounded and perturbed, Nellie stood in shock staring at the mother, the 10-year-old held clumsily in her arms.

The bus was moving, but only slowly because of the heavy Christmas traffic. Everybody was staring at Nellie waiting to see what the "expert" would do. Time stood still and Nellie felt the pressure.

"Lord," she thought, "what do I know about choking children, much less first aid?" As far as she remembers, she said not a word during the whole incident. What to do? A child in mortal danger in her arms, a bus-load of curious and shocked passengers watching, and a mother with a terrified look on her face.

It felt like a lifetime but probably only 10 or 15 seconds had passed. Nellie says she "came to", as it were, when she heard the traffic outside the bus, and her brain began to click into gear. She had a vague memory of something she had seen before. What was it called?

Heimlich manoeuvre

Still holding onto the child who by now had become a dead weight in her arms, Nellie struggled to lift and move her so that she was leaning forward, almost bent in two over her arm. Nellie put her other arm round the youngster, brought her two hands together and pressed them in against her, just under her chest. She pressed hard two, perhaps three times - and the sweet popped out of the child's mouth. She came to, coughing and gasping for breath. Everyone cheered and clapped.

A relieved and still stunned Nellie thrust the child back into the arms of her grateful and astounded mother. Then Nellie remembered the name for what she had done. It was called the Heimlich manoeuvre.

To this day she still blushes at the incident and how she knew what to do. She had seen the manoeuvre performed three years before that, in an episode of the mother and father of all soap operas, Dallas.

One of the main characters in the soap, Lucy, otherwise known as the actress Charlene Tilton, had been choking and somebody - Nellie doesn't remember who - saved the day and the character, with the Heimlich manoeuvre.

What embarrasses Nellie even more is that when somebody on the bus that day - she thinks it was the girl's mother - said to her: "You're a nurse, aren't you?", Nellie just nodded. What could she say? She felt she couldn't tell the woman her child had been saved because of some vaguely remembered trashy soap opera on TV.

She did not want to embarrass the mother by revealing that she had entrusted her child to a "fraud" with absolutely no medical experience.

Anyway, Nellie did not think of herself as a heroine who had saved a child's life. Rather, she took the decidedly negative view that she could have done something wrong which might affect the child later, prompting the mother to sue!

Offered £10

To this day, more than a decade later, she fears that something untoward happened to the girl in the aftermath of the incident on the bus. At the time the girl's mother was so grateful she tried to press £10 of her Christmas shopping money into Nellie's hand. "Go on," she urged her. "To get yourself a drink." Nellie demurred, embarrassed, and hopped off the bus two stops before her normal destination.

So what are the lessons Nellie learnt from this unusual incident all those years ago? Well, for starters, beware of sudden moves. They can prove traumatic. On the other hand, perhaps "soaps" aren't so trashy after all.