A nurse is being hailed a hero after her quick response saved the life of a 12-year-old who had been pulled out into the ocean by a rip current while enjoying a day at the beach in Nova Scotia.
Now, Sarah Poulin is hoping to find the nurse who saved her daughter’s life in order to properly thank her.
Sarah’s 12-year-old daughter Fiona went to Conrad Beach, just over half an hour east of Halifax, on Wednesday with a family friend and her daughter.
“I was just in the water with my friend, and we were just jumping waves. One wave was too big for me to jump, so I just wanted to swim it. That one ended up taking me out to sea, and I didn’t notice until I couldn’t touch the ground,” Fiona recalled.
Fiona was so far out that everyone on the beach looked like “specks.”
“It was pretty hard because the waves were, like, up to the ceiling, and they were just one after another, so I had almost no time to breathe, so I tried to stay on top of the waves. It was pretty hard to stay afloat,” Fiona said.
Realizing she was caught in a rip current, Fiona tried swimming diagonally back to shore but found she was not getting any closer.
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Just trying to stay afloat, Fiona was treading water while she tried to signal for help.
According to the National Ocean Service, a rip current is a strong, narrow current of water that moves directly away from shore and can move at speeds of up to eight feet per second.
The agency reports that panicked swimmers put themselves at risk of drowning from fatigue when they try to swim against it back to shore.
Emily Bolhuis, who had taken her daughter and Fiona to the beach that day, says they had been there for a few hours when she called the girls to come out of the water.
Bolhuis says her daughter returned, but she noticed Fiona was not with her.
Fighting back tears, Bolhuis recounts what happened next.
“She got stuck in a current. Once I realized, I just started screaming her name and realized, OK, she can’t come back; I’ve got to go in there,” she said.
Bolhuis says she was about to head in when two people who heard her screams ran towards her.
“I was about to go in because I can swim, but I’m not a trained lifeguard. But I was going to go in, and there was a hero there, and she was like, ‘I got this, I can do this. I’m a trained lifeguard,’” Bolhuis recalled the woman saying to her.
She says that within minutes, the woman, a nurse named Emily, had Fiona safely back on dry land.
“It all happened so fast. Honestly, it felt like it all happened in about five minutes. It was the longest five minutes of my life,” Bolhuis said.
“Thank you. Thank you’s not enough. I’m forever grateful because I don’t know I could have done what she did.”
Sarah has since posted about the interaction in the Ask Nova Scotia: Anything Goes group on Facebook to try to find Emily and thank her.
“I’m just so thankful that that nurse was there, nurse Emily. She was there to bring Fiona back because Fiona told me that, apparently, it was too difficult for her to get out of the rip current, so she just had to concentrate on staying afloat,” Sarah said.