Mom Saves Stranger's Life the First Time She Leaves Her Newborn
Rene Geneva Renko with her daughter, August Sequoia, and Matthew Galvez, the man whose life she saved. (Photo: Shelby Tauber/Austin American-Statesman)
A mother who left the house for her first hour away from her infant wound up saving the life of a stranger who had a heart attack on the side of the road.
When Rene Geneva Renko left her two-month-old with her husband last month, she just wanted a little “me time” to go shopping. “I mapped the whole thing out. ‘Ok, if I have one hour and this budget, I’m going to look for only this one thing,’ and I knew that if my husband called to say my daughter was hungry I’d have to come home since I breastfeed exclusively,” the Austin, Tex., mother tells Yahoo Parenting. “The thrift store is in walking distance but I drove that day to save that extra minute.”
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At the store, Renko found an antique clock after only 20 minutes, so she hopped back in the car to head home. “I still had 40 minutes of freedom, but I wanted to cuddle with my kid and hang out with my husband,” she says. But while sitting at a stoplight, she noticed a man with his bike, sitting on the grass near some railroad tracks. “I couldn’t tell that anything was wrong, but who says ‘I’m just going to take a break in this inconvenient place?’”
So Renko decided to pull over and ask the man, Matthew Galvez, what she could do for him. Galvez told her he had blacked out, and that maybe he should go to a hospital. Renko offered to give him a ride, but a few moments after getting in her car, Galvez stopped breathing. “It went quickly from ‘I think this guy is pretty much OK’ to ‘this guy is dead in my car,’” she says.
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Luckily, they were only a few minutes from the hospital, and with some quick thinking from Renko — crossing three highway lanes and making a speedy U-turn — she got Galvez to medical care in under three minutes. “What was terrifying was not knowing how this was going to turn out,” Renko says. “When I was driving Mr. Galvez to the hospital, I was just trying to make the best decisions I could. But I had no hope — I was pretty sure he was dead.”
When Renko pulled into the ambulance bay, she says doctors quickly tried to revive Galvez and were successful on the second try. “Before I left, a doctor came out and said to me, ‘You know, if this man lives you will have saved his life. How does it feel to be a hero today?’” She found out later that Galvez’s heart was blocked on both sides and he had suffered a massive heart attack on the side of the road.
Renko called her husband to tell him what happened before heading home — and, she notes, her “hour of freedom” still wasn’t up. “When I walked in the house the first thing I said to my husband was, ‘I still have three minutes!’” Ninety minutes later, the hospital called to tell her Galvez had survived.
Five surgeries — including a quintuple bypass — later, Galvez has turned a corner, Renko says, and the two have been in touch. Though the incident occurred on May 16, Renko says it’s just becoming public because Galvez reached out to the local news to recognize her brave actions.
Still, Renko says, she doesn’t feel like a hero. “I just acted in accordance with my own values,” she says. “That’s somebody else’s father and son and brother, and I’ve got those people too, and I’d want someone to do that for me.”
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