A grateful grandmother thanked a hero town crier today for saving her life – after she became impaled on a STEPLADDER.
Ruth Robinson, 82, fell through the old-fashioned steps while hanging curtains in her home and was stabbed in the stomach by a broken piece of metal.
She became wedged in the contraption with a piece of broken ladder stabbing in her stomach and would have died had it not been for a town-crier who heard her screams.
Bruce Trigger rushed to the scene and had to hold Mrs Robinson up for 10 minutes before the ambulance arrived to avoid the shard entering her internal organs.
Ruth said: “The ladder had a platform and I fell right through it. I felt something stab me in the tummy and there was blood everywhere coming from my leg.
“I was wedged in the frame, screaming the house down.
“A piece of the broken ladder had stabbed me in my middle. Bruce had to lift me up to stop the shard digging in any further.
“He held me up for about 10 minutes until the ambulance arrived.”
Mr Trigger said: “I could see Ruth was in absolute agony and I did what any good neighbour would do.
“They said if I hadn’t been there, the ladder would have dug in and damaged her vital organs. When the emergency services took over, I left so I wasn’t in the way.
“I had to open the church fete in Montacute that afternoon.”
Mrs Robinson was hanging the drapes in her home, in Stoke sub Hamdon, when she crashed through the ladder.
The octogenarian had to call an ambulance herself while trapped in the device after her husband Gerald, who struggles to speak and walk after having a stroke 20 years ago, managed to bring her the telephone.
Her screams bought neighbour and Yeovil town crier Mr Trigger to her rescue and firefighters cut Mrs Robinson free within three minutes using a saw.
She said: “I was just in so much pain and getting dizzier and dizzier.
“I heard a man ask the person holding me up, ‘have you got her? When I cut this last bit she’s going to drop’.
“When I felt myself falling free of the ladder it was such a relief. I felt a further flood of relief when they laid me down on the stretcher.”
Emergency services had to move Mrs Robinson out of her bungalow through her bedroom window, because the stretcher could not get around the corners of her hallway to the front door.
She was admitted to Yeovil District Hospital where she was put under general anaesthetic.
She suffered a wound to her calf, a long scrape up her leg as well as a 10 inch laceration and a stab wound to her stomach.
Mrs Robinson’s daughter Lynn Armfield said: “This ladder could have been around since the 1960s.
“If I had had any idea it was in the house I would have got rid of it.”
The ladder has now been burnt.
