Gloria Borrelli and her mother Francesca drowned with tears while they turned to hug and kiss Mikhael Esterez on the cheek, repeating the words “Thank you” again and again outside the Sacré-Coeur hospital in Montreal.
After more than a week of looking for the good Samaritans who delivered RCP who saved life to the father of Gloria, Sabato Borrelli, 87, the mother and daughter finally met Esterez and another woman who played a key role that day, but who wanted to maintain her private identity. Borrelli had collapsed after entering a cardiac arrest while leaving his daily walk on May 15, near Jarry Park.
“You are superheroes for us,” Gloria told you.
On Monday, the two strangers met Borrelli inside their hospital room, where he continues to recover from the test. He managed to greet and say “many times,” he said.
Esterez contacted CBC after reading about Borrelli’s recovery and the search for the good Samaritan family that saved him. But he insisted that CBC also found the woman at the scene that was the first to call 911 and start the compressions that day.
“I am very happy to have more time with someone who is important for them,” he said. “We all have people we care for and sometimes we want to have more time with them.”
Borrelli turned 87 on the day he woke up at the hospital on May 17. Coincidentally, that same day, Esterez turned 35, wondering what had been of the man who helped a couple of days before.
He had reached the parking lot of his daughter’s nursery around 3 pm when he saw Bold lying on the floor, a woman on the phone near him. The 911 operator asked if there were some defibrillators nearby. Esterez entered the nursery hoping to find one, but there was none.
At that time, the woman had already begun to give compressions in Borrelli’s chest to the rhythm established by the 911 operator. Feeling some tension on his wrists, he let Esterez take over after a few minutes.
“He has these very intense blue eyes and I remember looking at him while doing the compressions and was looking at me, so I really expected to see him as me today, I live with life in his eyes because I feared they were chasing me for a while,” he said.
Esterez continued until a first paramedic reached a SUV equipped with a defibrillator at 3:15 pm, according to the Urgences-Santé record.
The paramedic shocked Borrelli and asked an unidentified second man to take care of chest compressions, said Esterez. Five minutes later, at 3:20 pm, the ambulance arrived and Borrelli was urgently taken to the hospital.
“You stay there and you don’t know if you did good or if the person is still alive,” said Esterez.
The spokesman for Urgences-Santé, Jean-Pierre Rouleau, says they were receiving a large volume of calls that day, so the ambulance took as much as it did. The original shipping was received at 3:02 pm
In the last 30 days, the ambulances of Urgences-Santé have arrived at the scene of a high priority call in 8 minutes and 50 seconds, says Rouleau.
“Unfortunately, there are days when demand exceeds the supply and, well, it is more difficult to answer as fast as we would like,” he said. “We would always like to have more resources, but it is linked to budgets.”
Esterez said that 18 minutes was a long time, thinking that traffic had something to do with the delay.
For him, the lessons of that day are quite clear:
“People should learn RCP and get out of the way [for] The ambulance, “he said.
