On the evening of 15 March 2022, Lucille and Dave Strachan had supper in their north Wales home, watched their favourite TV show, Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly, then went upstairs to bed. Apart from one bout of food poisoning in the 1970s, Dave had never been ill before. But at about 11.
20pm he woke up and told Lucille he had chest pains and difficulty breathing. Lucille called their daughter Hilary, a doctor, before dialling 999 and asking for an ambulance. Was Dave breathing, the call operator asked.
Yes, but he has chest pains and he’s cold, said Lucille. The call operator asked her to monitor Dave, to tell them every time he took a breath, information which was then fed into a computer. Lucille was told the ambulance would take about four hours to arrive.
“I thought: ‘I’m not going to wait four hours!’” she says. “So I rang my 86-year-old neighbour, Gareth the farmer.” It was past midnight now, but Gareth came immediately with his son Tudor and daughter-in-law Nia.
If they could just get Dave downstairs and into the car, thought Lucille, she could drive him to hospital herself. But looking at the steep stairs inside and the slate steps and darkness outside, while considering Dave’s height – 6ft 2in – they decided they couldn’t manage. They would wait.
The neighbours stayed and Tudor headed into the lane outside with a torch so the ambulance could see which way to come. When he saw blue lights flashing in the valley below he thought: “Here it is.” .
