Kindness of strangers: my husband was stung by a stingray, then the whole beach stepped up

I had just put something in the oven when the phone rang. It was my husband, who hesitated for a moment before he said: “I’ve just been stung by a stingray. Can you come down to the beach?”

He’d taken the car to drive down for a swim, so I was going to have to walk. It was a hot January day and would have taken me about 15 minutes on foot, so when I passed a house a few doors down with two cars parked outside, I knocked on the front door. I’d never met them before, but I thought, the worst they can say is no. I told them what had happened and one of them drove me.

By the time I got to the beach, the ambulance was there treating my husband. He was in shocking pain. The sting ray had gone right through his foot – it was dreadful. Because his blood pressure had dropped, he was starting to lose consciousness. His eyes were closing and his head was rolling back, which was terrifying. We’re in our early 70s – we’re not spring chickens. With a freak accident like that, you just don’t know what could happen.

A woman saw me walk up and said: “Are you Trish?” She had called the ambulance and waited with my husband until it arrived. She stuck around to make sure I was OK, and was so kind to me. Soon another woman came up to offer a nice cold bottle of water from her car fridge. Next, two guys I’d never seen before picked up all my husband’s stuff, asked where the car was and put it in the boot for me. One of them even offered to drive me to the hospital.

My husband spent the afternoon in hospital and went back the next day for surgery to make sure there was nothing left in the wound that could poison him. He was on crutches for a week or two after that, but he was OK.

The next day, those neighbours who drove me down to the beach put a note in the letterbox to say they hoped my husband was alright. They’ve now become friendly acquaintances, which is lovely. I went back to the beach the next day to just stand there and make myself prominent, because I thought if the people who helped came back to the same spot, they might recognise me. But I didn’t see anybody, so I never got to say thank you.

It’s heartwarming to think that people will step up in an emergency and do what needs to be done to help someone. I hope that if I was ever in that sort of situation, I would step up to help someone else too. I wouldn’t look away.