'We were meant to cross paths.' Woman and the stranger she gave lifesaving CPR to become friends through Facebook.
Marianne LaPlante went to the grand opening of an Aldi supermarket in Howell, N.J., last week with her 94-year-old mother when she started to not “feel right.”
LaPlante, attempting to put her head down to rest on her cart, fell to the ground, hitting her head.
That’s when Lisa Manoy, a nurse for 15 years, stepped up to help a stranger. “Marianne, when I arrived, was convulsing severely. There was blood all around her head. An immense amount of blood. It was traumatic,” Manoy told Yahoo Lifestyle. The amount of blood suggested it wasn’t just a surface wound and, although Manoy hasn’t worked as a nurse for some years, she quickly began her work.
Manoy checked LaPlante’s vital signs as the woman was going in and out of consciousness. “A gentleman held her head for me and applied pressure to the back of her head where she hit it while I was checking her,” Manoy recounted. “All of a sudden, she just started to turn pale, and then a shade of blue. She stopped breathing on me.”
While Manoy administered CPR, her daughter, Lindsay, 24, helped keep LaPlante’s mother calm. Despite being shaken by the amount of blood, Lindsay started to pray with LaPlante’s mother, helping to calm the woman down. “[Lindsay’s] very compassionate, all my girls are like that,” Manoy told Yahoo, a trait that clearly doesn’t fall far from the tree. “I taught them when they were young just to be kind, be compassionate, always do for others. Help people when you can.”
After two or three minutes of CPR, which felt like forever to Manoy, LaPlante spit up, and the color returned to her face.
LaPlante was taken to the hospital, but Manoy spent the rest of the night worrying about her. She was certain she would never see the woman again.
“I called [the hospital] where she was, and they wouldn’t let me through because of the privacy policy. So I just thought, ‘Oh God, how am I going to get in touch with her?’”
But it didn’t take long for Facebook to work its magic.
“I would like to thank the woman who resuscitated me at Aldi’s yesterday afternoon. You have may well saved my life. Also, thank you to the woman who held my 94 yr old Mom and said prayers with her while waiting for the ambulance,” LaPlante said on Facebook. “There is still great good in this world.”
The post had to be shared only 200 times before Lindsay saw it the next morning on Howell Happenings NJ’s Facebook group. Lindsay ran down the stairs to her mother, saying, “Mom, it’s on Facebook! Marianne wants to thank you!”
“So I looked, and there was a letter posted to me,” Manoy recalled.
Manoy and LaPlante, former strangers, have now been speaking every day on the telephone and through texts, and, of course, through Facebook messenger. She is doing well and is visiting doctors to find out what caused the fall.
“Tomorrow will be a week [since the fall.] Tonight she called and she’s making reservations to a restaurant for Lindsay and me, she wants us to join her and her mom,” Manoy told Yahoo. “She said, ‘Is it silly to tell you I love you?’ And I said, ‘No, it’s not silly at all, because I feel the same way. I love you too.’”
Manoy believes that the two were supposed to meet each other. “We were meant to cross paths,” she said. “That’s all it was.”
Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:
Why people feel the need to give you, and celebrities like Lena Dunham, unsolicited advice
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