KEY POINTS:
A mother of three who saved a teenager after he was speared through the neck by a tree branch told how she stemmed the bleeding with her children's clothes - although she usually faints at the sight of blood.
In an emotional reunion, college student Gareth Clark, 16, was able to thank rescuer Phyllis Ahipene when she visited him at Waikato Hospital yesterday, a week after a car crash almost claimed his life.
She said she was able to stop him bleeding to death at the roadside because she attended a basic first aid course while working at Morrinsville New World supermarket five years earlier.
Gareth's mother, Jo, was also there, and thanked Ms Ahipene for her quick actions in stemming the flow of blood from Gareth's jugular vein after a five-pronged branch speared through his neck during the crash.
Ms Ahipene was the first on the scene and as she applied pressure to the teenager's bleeding neck her three children - aged 9, 4, and four months - and 10-year-old nephew looked on.
"I usually faint at the sight of blood, but I think the course might have helped," she said yesterday.
She had no idea of the extent of Gareth's injuries until she was approached by the Herald yesterday while working at her part-time job at Cafe Jak's in Matamata.
But news of the drama had spread. Two customers in the cafe congratulated her as she served them coffee.
Ms Ahipene described how she saw Gareth stumbling by the roadside with blood pouring from his neck wound.
"I just grabbed a sweatshirt off my son, and he (Gareth) was stumbling out of the trees covered in blood which was everywhere.
"I noticed a cut on the left hand side and laid him down on the ground in the recovery position."
Once the bleeding appeared under control, she secured the sweatshirt around his neck.
It was this action that helped keep Gareth alive.
Although the branch missed his vertebrae and spinal cord, oesophagus, larynx, carotid arteries, and one jugular vein, it ruptured the other jugular.
But the sweatshirt enabled clots to form around the rupture and stem the bleeding.
Ms Ahipene said her partner, Cliff Williams, had suffered a similar injury in a motorbike crash about 10 years ago, when his neck was torn by a barbed wire fence.
Mrs Clark said she was glad a fellow mother was first at the scene.
"It's amazing she had the courage to do something. When you're a mum I think you empathise with other mums, and you'll do things like that for other people's children.
Gareth said once out of hospital he would call in at Cafe Jak's for a special coffee.
The accident happened last Tuesday after Gareth had sat his first NCEA exam.
His friend lost control of the car and it careered into a clump of trees.
The driver was uninjured but the branch passed through the passenger-side window and entered Gareth's neck at an angle.
