Anyone who is asked if they would help someone in need will say “yes” without thinking twice. And maybe we all do have the best of intentions, but would we really all act so selflessly if someone needed our help?
Well, nobody can be a hundred percent sure about that until they find themselves in such a situation.
Like the one a Cracker Barrel employee found herself in not so long ago.
In the midst of Covid, most people would be scared to go too close to someone, even more so, if that “someone” was sick. But this woman did, and her heroic action saved a life.
Ashton is a manager at the Belleview, FL Cracker Barrel, and that day she was working her shift as always.
At that moment, she was following a server with a tray to a table that overlooked the interstate, when she saw something that looked like an emergency.
A woman had pulled over and was out of her car screaming for help.
Ashton asked her team to call 911, while she rushed to the stranger’s car. She even climbed the barbwire fence that separated her from the road in order to reach her.
“Agnes, the mother was running around the car frantic, [telling] me her son was in the car and he’s sick and he’s not breathing,” Ashton recalled.
The driver, Agnes, quickly explained that her son Paul was unconscious in the passenger seat. The two women carefully took him out of the car, where Ashton started doing CPR.
“All I remember I kept thinking was ‘I hope this works'”.
And it worked. At some point, Paul finally took a breath.
“It was a long time,” Agnes, the mother, recounts. “Paul took a breath- like, he gasped.”
The next thing they knew, the ambulance had arrived and took Paul to the nearest hospital.
Ashton asked Agnes if she knew how to get to the hospital, but she didn’t know the place very well. She and her son, who had not been feeling well the days before, were returning home to Montgomery, AL, from Tampa. During the trip, Paul had passed out, woke up, then passed out again. And that’s when he had stopped breathing.
So, realizing that the mother needed more help, Ashton plugged in the hospital address on Agnes’ GPS, and made sure she was fine before letting her go.
The women kept in touch the weeks that followed. Paul spent weeks fighting for his life, but eventually, he made a full recovery.
Agnes knows that today her child is alive thanks to Ashton’s selfless act. As she says, not a day passes by that she doesn’t think of her and her kindness.
“Everything happens for a reason, and you don’t meet people by coincidence,” Ashton believes.
Agnes believes Ashton is her guardian angel, and rightfully so. Thanks to her, her son is with her today.
Watch Agnes and Ashton recount the incredible story in the video below from Cracker Barrel!
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