Chantelle Whitmore was ordering a sandwich at a Subway store in Cheshire when she collapsed on the floor after choosing which bread she wanted – customers saved her life
A mum-of-five has praised a group of strangers who saved her life after she suffered a heart attack in the middle of Subway.
Chantelle Whitmore, 32, says she passed out in front of four members of the public in the takeaway shop in Warrington, Cheshire. Two of the customers, a midwife and chemist worker, rushed over to her as she collapsed on December 30.
The mum said she was selecting what bread she wanted just moments before she dropped ill. She explained that the ambulance took almost three hours to arrive, but the kind customers waited with her. Chantelle said they sat with her and kept her talking while her partner ran to get a defibrillator.
Speaking about the “scary” ordeal, the salon owner said that everything after ordering her sandwich is a blur as she passed out. She added: “I was hot and sweating and so they stripped me off and tried to keep me cool. My partner had run to the chemist next door and one lady from there brought a blood pressure machine. I stopped breathing, and they called the ambulance, but they said it was going to be about a 40-minute wait.
“They all stayed with me and kept their eye on me, trying to get me to talk. They tried to sit me up, but then I got chest pains, so they sloped me back down and my partner ran to get a defibrillator.” It took just under three hours for an ambulance to get to Chantelle, who had been drifting in and out of consciousness and had stopped breathing multiple times.
She added: “One minute I was talking and saying I had a headache and chest pains, and then the next I wasn’t breathing and wasn’t conscious again. At the time I was oblivious to what was happening and I kind of woke up and saw my dad was crying, and my partner was crying. I knew at that point something was going on, but I was oblivious to the fact that I was me involved in it.”
Chantelle has since been told my doctors she likely suffered a small heart attack. She added: “It’s one of those things that you kind of think will never happen to you, but it’s literally from going to buy my son a birthday cake. It was very scary, and it just goes to show how quickly things can happen and how quick things can change.
“My partner said that all that kept going through his mind is just ‘how and what am I going to tell the kids’. There were no signs, I hadn’t been poorly before. It happened so fast.” All the strangers who helped took her partner’s contact details and asked after her regularly and she now hopes they can stay in touch.
Chantelle said: “I can’t put into words how thankful I am – I literally owe them my life. My children would have been without a mother if it wasn’t for them and their fast actions. It’s nice to know that people in the world still care about other people. I think there’s such negativity and there were other people in the store that chose to walk away.
“I keep thinking if everybody that was in the store that day chose to walk away, my poor partner dealing with it on his own, it could have been a completely different story.” She added: “I would never have got that first birthday back. To think of my kids not having me at that age, it puts things into perspective. I’m thinking a lot more about things and I have a different attitude to life. Now I want to just spend as much time with the kids making memories.”
