Miraculous Survival: Mother Defies Odds After Grueling Three-Hour Ambulance Wait

In the grand tapestry of life, there are moments of pure chaos that demand our attention—times when the universe seems to conspire against us. Carolyn Vickery, a woman from Orbost, found herself tangled in such a moment, and let's just say it wasn’t your typical Saturday night drama.

Picture this: a brain aneurysm causing a frantic family to jam the phone lines as they dial triple-0, only to find that an ambulance, their ticket to salvation, is stuck in traffic—or, more accurately, just not there at all. Carolyn’s family waited three hours for help to arrive, a time frame that feels less like a medical emergency and more like a bad joke—only this one wasn’t funny at all.

As fate would have it, Carolyn was experiencing symptoms that were like a scene straight out of a medical thriller, falling in and out of consciousness while her brother, Dr. Kelvin Adams, a general practitioner, was dialing for help like a player in an urgent game of charades gone wrong. Alas, the emergency room doors felt like they were several lifetimes away, with the clock ticking mercilessly toward a heart-stopping conclusion.

Now, let's unpack the statistics for a moment because they deserve a spotlight of their own. During July to September, Ambulance Victoria reports they could only reach urgent patients “on time” 65.4 percent of the time—enough to make you shudder. None of us expected a fast response during peak hours, but when your life hangs in the balance, you’d hope for more than a flip of a coin.

Ideally, ambulances are supposed to swoosh in, lights flashing and sirens blaring, to scoop you off to safety within a mere 15 minutes. But in the case of East Gippsland—where Orbost is nestled like an underappreciated gemstone—that mark was hit only 48.8 percent of the time. It seems the local paramedics were off somewhere else, perhaps on an unplanned field trip to Mallacoota, which, in clear weather, is a good hour and 45-minute drive away. But it's never clear weather when you need it most, right?

As the clock struck midnight on that fateful morning of August 17, Dr. Adams’s pleas turned into a frantic ballet of urgency instead. He had shifted gears from diagnosing his sister—who, let’s not forget, was basically dying before his eyes—to praying for the swift arrival of an ambulance, which was more elusive than a good parking spot in a crowded lot.

“She was … basically dying in front of me,” he recounted, a statement that sounded straight out of a medical drama but was painfully real.

His second call to triple-0 came at 12:24 a.m., shortly after Carolyn’s condition took a nosedive. It seems that sometimes, desperation is the only language emergency services understand—“I was giving her sternal rubs to try and wake her up,” he recalled, as if channeling all those years of medical training into saving his own sister.

After what felt like an eternity, he made the difficult decision to leave Carolyn’s side and race to the nearest local hospital, which was staffed by the very capable—but gloriously overworked—nurses. In fact, the whole place seemed like a set-up for a new medical sitcom. Picture it: A tiny hospital where serious cases are whisked away an hour down the road like bad leftovers nobody wants.

Ms. Vickery did eventually receive help, finally getting whisked off to Bairnsdale and then flung into the oxygen-chated arms of Melbourne, where surgeons awaited. Seven hours after the initial call, she was on the operating table—a mere blip on the radar for anyone who has experienced less dramatic emergencies, but a lifetime for Carolyn’s worried family.

“The outcome could have very easily been very, very different,” said her son, Alex Vickery, a paramedic himself, clearly aware of how close things had come to disaster. What the Vickery family had learned that night was less about the fragility of life and more about the inherent flaws in a system designed to save it.

“Healthcare should be equitable,” Alex proclaimed, sounding like the voice of reason while also holding onto a tangible frustration. His mother was alive, but it was a “lucky” kind of survival, one that could have ended dramatically differently had fate not smiled upon their family.

In the end, Carolyn Vickery walked away not just with tales of medical heroics but with a quiet hope that sharing their experience might usher in a much-needed conversation about the state of emergency medical services in regional Australia. There's a lesson here, tucked beneath the layers of trauma and statistics, and it’s one that must be taken to heart: everyone deserves swift access to care, no matter where they live. After all, life is already filled with enough waiting—we shouldn’t have to wait for help in our darkest hours.