Northlander Vaughan Collier hails daughter Nicole as his hero after brush with death

When Northlander Vaughan Collier took a U-turn in an act of chivalry to help a lady in strife on SH1, he would be dead within minutes, then brought back to life thanks to his teenaged daughter. A series of astonishing events that January Sunday of Auckland Anniversary weekend saw the road closed due to a fatality (Collier’s), a cluster of strangers brought together to save his life and subsequent connections formed. A bed-bound Collier tells his story to Jodi Bryant from Auckland Hospital.

Collier was heading north from Hikurangi when he asked his 16-year-old daughter Nicole, who was driving, to turn around as he’d seen a woman lying under a double horse truck about to change a blown-out tyre.

It was “a hell of a blowout” about 100m south of Hūkerenui pub but he found the toolkit and began jacking the float up to the height needed but “the horse inside moved and the truck fell off the jack”.

“I found some rocks to chock the wheels and jacked it up. It was quite hefty and the whole truck was on a slope off the road. It was a hot day so I’d work until I was buggered and then would sit back and we’d take turns at winding,” recalls Collier, who’d had heart issues previously.

Nicole and dad Vaughan, post-surgery.

They removed the wheel nuts but the wheel still didn’t budge so Collier, 61, slid under the truck with a rock and began bashing the tyre from behind to loosen it.

“What happened next changed my life forever as my heart flicked into ventricular tachycardia and I passed away.”

Nicole picks up the story.

“Dad was looking really pale and out of breath so I said, ‘Dad, just sit down and breathe for a while’ but he said, ‘No, I’ll be fine’.”

Collier, Nicole and Freya Johnstone, the horse van owner, worked together for a while to free the wheel.

“Dad was lying on his left side under the van and his breathing went really raspy and he started gurgling,” the Year 12 Kamo High School student recalls. “I looked at his feet and hands and they were both yellow, which is what always happens to him, so I knew it was heart-related. He started going stiff so I grabbed my phone and pulled him out with my left arm and just ripped him out from under the van.

“His face had started going yellow, his tongue was swelling and saliva started coming out of his mouth and I was thinking, ‘Don’t you dare die on me Dad’.”

But he already had. Collier had just had his seventh heart attack.

“I yelled to Freya that he was having a heart attack and we both tried calling 111 and I began performing CPR. He’s got dentures in but the bottom ones were falling down so, before I did the first breath, I just ripped them out and started blowing air into his mouth.

“Freya was talking to 111 over the speaker and Dad’s face was yellow up to his eyes and his forehead was all purple and blue. His right eye was half-shut but his left eye was fully open and staring forward. His eyes were creepy, they’re a light-blue colour and they were staring straight into my soul. I didn’t realise it at the time but he was definitely dead at that point.”

Johnstone had been travelling back to Auckland after an overnight horse trek near Paihia with her 15.2hh Irish Sport horse Captain Underpants.

“It had been amazing; we rode horses down the river, through valleys surrounded by native bush ... When the tyre blew out, I pulled over to the side of the road and looked to see if there was a tyre change service available but, being a public holiday, everything was closed but I thought, ‘That’s okay, I know how to change a tyre myself’.

“I was lying down trying to get the spare tyre out and that’s when Vaughan and his daughter Nicole, who told me she was a fellow horse rider, stopped to help.

“Vaughan told me that he had had a number of previous heart attacks and was concerned about pushing himself too hard, and Nicole was also concerned so we were taking it fairly easy but I could see he was struggling a bit.

“The tyre wouldn’t come off so Nicole looked underneath and realised the tyre was shredded and wrapped around the axle. Nicole was fantastic, she knew how to do it all, she’s a great kid.”

While Johnstone, an air hostess, had undertaken a first aid course for her job, she had never carried out CPR before. However, the pair took turns.

“I was thinking this guy is not going to come back to life and I don’t want his daughter to watch him die and me not doing anything.”

Enter Mike Powell, a local farmer who was returning from the same horse trek with his daughter Bella and who, coincidentally, Nicole and her mum Deb had brought a puppy from two weeks earlier.

Powell, who had never administered CPR before, took over while Nicole protected her dad’s head from the gravel with each impact.

Not far behind Powell in the traffic happened to be a convoy of medics returning to Auckland from a course they had undertaken in Kawakawa, who heard over the communications system about the roadside event.

The first one pulled over and took over compressions before the second carload followed suit and applied their defibrillator, but with no response. The ambulance then arrived and took over, this time with success and Collier, who is believed to have been dead for 10 minutes, began to regain colour.

Describes Nicole: “His eyes became really glassy. I went back over to him and was sitting there holding his hand telling him everything would be all right. I rang my mum and said, ‘Can you come up to Hūkerenui, Dad’s had a heart attack.’ Mum started driving with her friend and she (later) said there was no traffic because they’d closed the road because of a fatality. We hadn’t realised until we got to the hospital but he had died in my arms and then come back.”

Meanwhile Collier, whose last memory was lying under the horse van, heard his name being called and, through watery eyes, came back to life. He was placed in the ambulance and traffic resumed, so Nicole’s mum arrived at the scene.

“Mum went to see him in the ambulance and he was grey. He looked at her and whispered, ‘I can’t breathe Deb’. She told the paramedics and they wouldn’t allow either of us to travel in the ambulance with him as they needed as much room as possible because I found out later, they expected him to die on the way.”

They went to start the car but, while Collier had earlier gone back to turn off the motor, which he’d initially left idling, the lights had been left on and the battery run flat so Nicole caught a ride to Whangārei Hospital with the off-duty paramedics following the ambulance.

Vaughan Collier spent weeks in hospital following his roadside heart attack - his seventh.

“We could hear updates over the CB and we got to the lights in the middle of town and heard them say ‘fully responsive’! We got to the hospital and walked into ED and I saw Dad and he was waving at me! He still didn’t look good at all but I walked in and he winked at me and the doctors came out and started giving me high-fives and telling me I should look into a medical career,” tells Nicole, adding that it’s not the career for her.

Meanwhile, back at the roadside scene, a former workmate of Collier’s who lives nearby jumpstarted the car and brought a sledgehammer to remove the wheel from the horse van, working together with the fire crew.

Powell invited a shaken Johnstone to his nearby house for a cup of tea while she let Captain Underpants, who’d stayed remarkably calm throughout the ordeal, out in his paddock before later continuing on their journey.

Heart issues are hereditary in Collier’s family, with a succession of men dying in their early 60s and his mother also having suffered several heart attacks.

Says Nicole: “I said to the paramedics, ‘Don’t worry, he’s like a weed, you can’t kill him. I think he’s like a cat with nine lives.”

“Yeah, I am the year of the tiger,” admits Collier. “There’s some luck, it was just a fluke that everyone was there.”

Sixteen-year-old Nicole Collier, 16, pictured with Kabo Cosmic, is her dad’s hero.

But Nicole, his only child, is his true hero. Father and daughter have always been close.

“Nicole is the most amazing person I know and I owe a great deal to her and however many people stopped to assist,” says Collier who, unlike during his last heart attack, cannot recall an out-of-body experience. “I was told that, because of the rhythm of tachycardia, I would not have been revived without electricity in the form of the defib machine and Nicole only had 90 seconds to make the difference while compressions kept my blood/oxygen circulating. It was an incredible achievement and would have been a proud moment for any parent to witness. Except I was dead at the time.

“I had heaps of help and I probably couldn’t have done it myself so it was a team effort,” says Nicole humbly, who, apart from sitting through a CPR course at school years ago, had never physically practised it.

She continues: “I feel like it was more common sense and instinct just kicked in. Throughout the whole thing, Freya was my rock. The person I met less than one hour earlier, was the person I was relying on.”

“We got a lot of help,” recalls Johnstone. I’ve learnt how valuable those first aid courses are and how efficient emergency services are.”

Hato Hone St John’s latest Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest report shows that the daily number of people suffering a cardiac arrest in the community has increased from six on average to seven. It also revealed that only 23 per cent survived till arriving at hospital and 11 per cent were still alive 30 days after the cardiac arrest.

Te Tai Tokerau / Northland Hato Hone St John district operations manager Ben Lockie says: “We know that early CPR and application of an automated external defibrillator [AED] are crucial to survival when someone goes into cardiac arrest.

“Given that we spend most of our time with loved ones, friends, or colleagues, it’s likely that if you see someone go into cardiac arrest it may be someone you know. It is empowering to know you can gain the skillset to do something to help. Anyone can learn CPR at any age, and it doesn’t take long to learn either. Our report shows that community help can double the chances of survival.

“We’d love it if as many people as possible in Northland could learn how to perform CPR and how to use an AED. Anyone confident in CPR can then sign up to GoodSAM, which is an app that alerts people when there is someone in cardiac arrest nearby, giving them the opportunity to respond, and possibly help save their life.”

After grabbing Nicole’s number on the side of the road that day, the two have stayed in touch and are planning a Whananaki horse trek with Deb.

Following a week in Whangārei Hospital, Vaughan was taken to Auckland Hospital for an MRI before being fitted with a CRT-D (Cardio Resynchronising Therapy-Defibrillator.) The device can detect dangerous heart rhythms and deliver a stronger shock of energy, resetting the heartbeat.

“I just hope it’s first shock will do the trick, otherwise I might look like a fish flopping around on the ground,” jokes Vaughan.

So would he stop to help someone again in future?

“I would stop for somebody but I know my physical limits now. Thank you again to the people who stopped and helped Nicole with chest compressions. My chest feels like someone brought a sledgehammer but it worked and I am alive.”

For more information on how to sign up to a free 3 Steps for Life session in your area, the Hato Hone St John full first aid courses and more information on the GoodSAM programme, visit stjohn.org.nz.