I have a wonderful story to share.
(It is a long story, but I promise it is beautiful and a tad emotional, too)
Context, I’m a medical student and I live in a student house with my 2 friends, one other medic and a Spanish/history student.
So we have a wonderful relationship with our neighbours each side to us, both elderly couples with grown up children. Before moving in (ofc, people might have apprehension about uni students moving in next to them) we bought them each a card and some bubbly just as a goodwill gesture to let them know who we are, what we do, and that there’s no formalities between us - we’re here to help each other! They’d check in on us, say hello, and it’s been ever so pleasant being their neighbours. Just passing by, saying hello from our windows, or when I’m training in the garden, it’s been wonderful just being friends with people so much older than us, and learning from each other.
On one Friday night a few weeks ago, I had just come back home from the gym after a long day of being at medical school, and it was around 11pm when we heard a knock on the door. Someone was, and I stress, POUNDING on the door as if in desperation / anger. Then they started banging on the window. I was talking to my housemate at the time, stopped everything and opened the door. (We live in a quiet(ish) neighbourhood, and this sort of thing is not common at all where we live). It was our neighbour, an elderly woman, in a state of panic and out of breath, trying to tell me something had happened to her husband and he had “collapsed”.
I shouted to my medic house mate to get downstairs asap, and immediately ran into her house, (still sporting my gym clothes) and saw him lifeless on the floor. He was unresponsive to pain, speech and touch, eyes were faded and his limbs were not functioning either. I immediately started CPR. During compressions I grabbed his wife’s phone, and dialled 999, listening to the instructions as I continued to compress him. Soon my medic house-mate came in the room, and began to feel for any pulses. After about 10 minutes, he began to feel a faint radial pulse.
When paramedics came and took over, the three of us stayed with his wife (our neighbour) in the hallway, and did our best to help her remain calm and soothed whilst they attended to her husband in the living room. She kept thanking her lucky stars for our help, and I just kept saying to her that it’s because of her resilience that we managed to help. At the end of the day, in role or not, it’s our duty as medics, and more so human beings, to help our neighbours. Around an hour later, they had taken him to Resus and she went alongside him in the ambulance.
After the incident, the 3 of us went for a drive just to kind of process what had just happened, and were proud of each other for acting fast and not letting emotions get in the way of such a dire situation. At around 2am, I received a call from her, audibly in tears, saying that the doctors at the hospital had said we’d saved his life.
Our neighbour went on to live for another 5 days before sadly passing away due to hypoxia to the brain. The 5 days following the incident enabled his family and friends to gather him, visit him in hospital and the hospice, and to be around him when he peacefully died. Each day, our neighbour would come to us to update us on his situation, and we’d make sure to keep an eye on her from time to time.
We had his brothers, friends, grandchildren come to our door just to extend their gratitude for allowing them to spend those extra few days with him, and at his funeral it felt like a beautiful day of human kindness, togetherness and love.
What makes this even more special is that I and one of my housemates are Muslims from an ethnic minority background, and we were actually the only coloured people at his funeral. But our physical differences mattered none at all in this environment. Sometimes people have apprehensions and certain reservations of others, especially in the wake of media propaganda and scapegoating, but it’s a rather warming feeling when we remember that beyond these superficial divisions, we’re actually just all humans. Social beings, made to love, and support one another. We do live in an area decorated with England flags on the lampposts (not that that is a problem at all, but it’s not a myth that sometimes the gestures are done with equality not at the forefront) Who knows, maybe someone’s mind was changed that day, or during the whole incident, about people from other backgrounds.
Despite the bad reputation uni students and people from our community get in the media, this is what we’re about, and what we all always should be about.
Peace and love. ❤️