“It was emotional for me to see him so well.”
The nurse who saved a Dublin Bus driver’s life when he went into cardiac arrest behind the wheel earlier this week has spoken about their emotional reunion.
Aoife McGivney described what happened as she spoke to Ryan Tubridy on last night on The Late Late Show.
She began by explaining that she had nearly missed her bus on Monday morning, managing to catch it just in the nick of time. She was on her way to work at the Mater Hospital.
It was as the bus was coming up to O’Connell Street that she said people started to notice something was “a bit off.”
She said:
“We started going through a red light. I had my earphones in and people and started screaming and I was kind of like ‘What’s going on?’
“We kept rolling through the red light. Cars were breaking and beeping. We ended up going over a bicycle at the time, we were all like: ‘Oh my god, we’re after hitting something – what’s going on.”
Another passenger stood up and peered through the driver’s window, where she noticed that the driver wasn’t conscious.
Aoife added:
“I jumped into action, and obviously because I said I was a nurse everybody was looking at me like I had the answer to everything.”
With the help of other passengers on board, they managed to stop the bus, get the driver out of the booth and onto flat ground.
She said:
“He was in recovery position and his pulse went, and his breathing went, and I started CPR.
“So we just did compressions, the usual, get the AD machine, call 999.”
She also spoke about her reunion with the driver, Martin, that happened earlier this week.
She said:
“He’s great. I went into the hospital on Wednesday.
“I wanted to give him some space, this was all very publicised and he didn’t know anything really until his family had told him how big it was and how dangerous it was for him. We needed to let that sink in for him.
“So I met him… and, well, I cried. I bawled. I had seen him go through this trauma. It’s very different when you see someone and you’re trying to help them so much.
“It was emotional for me to see him so well. It was amazing. He was telling me about his life and his plans. I was just so grateful we’d got to do that for him.”
You can watch the interview in full below.
