Paul Cutler and his wife Suzanne were travelling back from the Wirral to Dartford when Paul noticed Suzanne was ‘lifeless’ in the front seat as they were driving along the M56
A grandad brought his wife back to life on the hard shoulder of a major motorway after she “died” in the passenger seat of their car.
Paul Cutler and his wife, Suzanne, were driving home to Dartford after a family celebration when he looked over and saw Suzanne was “lifeless”. The ex-salesman made an emergency stop on the M56 just outside Manchester and dragged her from the car onto a grass verge where he began giving her CPR.
During this, their daughter Annie, who had been travelling with them on the 200-mile-plus journey, called 999 for an ambulance. Paul, a Dartford councillor and former mayor, said: “It all happened so fast. I’d seen how it was done on television and just kept going.
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“Traffic was hammering past, and the air ambulance landed in a field nearby. Annie and I both thought we had lost her. Looking back, it was horrific.”
When paramedics arrived on the scene, they took over CPR, using a defibrillator on the roadside to resuscitate the 57-year-old former mayoress, who had suffered a cardiac arrest. Paul, 64, said: “On the third attempt, I heard somebody say ‘we have a pulse’.”
20-year-old Annie accompanied her mum in the ambulance, which was blue-lighted to Wythenshaw Hospital in Greater Manchester, which has a specialist heart unit. Paul followed in an ambulance support vehicle to be with her as she was rushed to the resuscitation room before being transferred to the ICU and put into an induced coma.
Suzanne, a mum-of-four and grandma, stabilised overnight, and with routine test results looking encouraging,medics decided to wake her up slowly. There was a risk at this point that she could have suffered brain damage due to a lack of oxygen.
After 25 days spent in hospital, Suzanne was discharged a week before Christmas. Paul stayed with their daughter in the Wirral, where the couple had travelled to for their grandson’s third birthday party.
“I had time on my side and started to go on the internet and do some research,” Paul said. “I was amazed at the statistics. Every minute makes a massive difference as the chances of survival fall to the floor. We were so close to losing her. It would have torn our family apart.”
Paul said that while he was at his wife’s bedside, doctors stopped by and were amazed at how she had pulled through the near-death ordeal. He said: “They described me as ‘the man who saved his wife’, and said she would not have lived if I had not carried out CPR immediately. But I’m not after praise. It’s about education.”
But it was not Suzanne’s first health scare, as Paul explained that five years ago she underwent successful breast cancer surgery and was given targeted therapy medication to fight off the formation of any more cancer calls. The treatment had a rare side effect on her heart, and she was rushed to hospital with pneumonia in 2021.
As a result, she had to take five months off from her job at an accountancy firm while she recovered. Ever since, she has faced no other health issues, until the cardiac arrest in December. Now, Paul is committed to making more people aware of the importance of CPR and having life-saving equipment like defibrillators in schools and colleages.
While he spent most of his career in corporate sales, he took on a part-time teaching job at Leigh UTC before retiring. He has contacted former colleagues to start an awareness campaign, and stressed the need for every school to have a defibrillator. Paul said an estimated 270 children die every year in the UK from sudden cardiac arrest, emphasising the need for awareness and equipment to be present in all schools.
“I want to get the ball rolling and reach out to as many people as possible,” he said. Suzanne has been left unable to drive for six months, and the couple are now spending time relaxing at home and doing gentle exercise, like walking. Suzanne had an ICD fitted – a device which monitors heart rhythm and prevents sudden cardiac arrest.
“When she moaned to the nurse that her ribs were aching because of the cracked ribs I had given her while doing CPR, I knew she was on the mend,” Paul joked. He served as Mayor of Dartford from 2022 to 2023, and currently servces on the Stone Parish Council. The couple have four children – Charlotte, 32, Emily, 28, James, 25, and Annie, 20, along with grandchildren Freddie, three, and four-month-old Primrose.
