A Saskatchewan senior who suffered a medical emergency behind the wheel is recovering in hospital thanks to quick-thinking strangers, including the man whose car he rear-ended.
Wayne Duquesne and his wife were on their way to a Sunday family dinner when they suddenly felt a jerk forward as their vehicle was struck.
He turned around to see that this wasn’t a normal fender bender.
“I saw that the man was slumped over to the passenger [side] of the car. And at that point I just looked at my wife and said, ‘Phone 911!’” he told CTV Saskatoon.
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Duquesne quickly jumped out of his vehicle and took the senior out of his car. That’s when he began performing CPR -- a skill he’d picked up when he became a lifeguard more than 30 years ago.
“Knowledge is power, right? So if you got the knowledge to act and make a difference, then that's what you should do,” he said.
The man who hit him was a 69-year-old man from Martensville, Sask., who had suffered a medical emergency just before the crash.
While Duquesne was performing CPR, passerby Krista Dick saw the commotion and ran into the Wrench Fitness gym down the street and quickly told the owner what was going on.
“[He] came downstairs with aspirin and he immediately ran to the scene and we kind of just stood by the fence watching as Wayne gave CPR,” she recounted.
The gym was equipped with two defibrillators, so fitness trainer Rejean Lepage grabbed both of them.
“I knew how to operate it, so I took over that part,” he said, adding that he and Duquesne began setting up the device.
“Then, we shocked the gentleman once and after a few seconds we checked his pulse and he seemed to be breathing,” he said. “Then first responders arrived.”
The man is expected to make a full recovery and is currently in hospital.
Lepage and Duquesne insist they aren’t heroes but that they were simply at the right place, at the right time.
“It makes me feel good that I was able to help somebody because I did have the training,” Duquesne said. “That's kind of why you want to go into lifeguarding -- because you want to be able to make things safer.”
The owners of Wrench Fitness said this was a learning experience for them and their customers, so they plan on holding additional CPR training in the coming weeks.
