Woman, 68, grateful for rescue after falling in snow
CBC
Bonnie Letrud had spent the past 10 minutes screaming for help.
Letrud, 68, began to wonder whether anyone would find her lying in the snow behind her Warman, Sask. home. The Monday storm that left large drifts blocking roads across much of the province had passed, but the sun was now setting and wind chill values had dropped below -35 C.
Her thoughts shifted to her cats, and how she needed to get back to feed them, then to her late husband and daughter, who both died in recent months.
Luckily, someone did hear those screams, and Letrud is hoping to find her rescuers to say thank-you.
"You just never know when you can make somebody's day by doing something kind," Letrud said in an interview Tuesday at her dining room table, sipping steaming tea as her cats brushed against her leg.
Late Monday afternoon, Letrud recalled, she decided to walk to the convenience store across the alley. She didn't think she'd be outside long, so didn't put on a hat or gloves.
She walked out the side door and began to step through the deep snow left by the storm, but before she reached the alley she fell and couldn't get up.
"I kinda stayed there for a while, and then I thought, well, I have to do something," she said, recalling that her fingers and face were becoming painful. "So I started crawling and rolling, screaming 'somebody please help me!'"
That part of the alley not visible to anyone inside the convenience store, nor to the other homes on the block.
Even though she was within five metres of her side door, and less than 10 metres from the store entrance, she couldn't make any more progress.
"A lot of it was fear," she said, "You get really anxious. I was lying there. I was thinking, what if nobody comes?"
She said she began to panic. She thought about her husband, Dale, who died of cancer a couple of months ago, and her daughter, Jennifer, who also died of another illness in the past year.
"I just thought, no, like this can't happen to my family. Not another person you know, Not another one of us."
After what Letrud thinks was another 10 minutes, she spotted a man at the end of the block. She wasn't sure he heard, so she yelled again as loud as she could.
