A PAINTER working at a Lakeside complex did not think of his own safety when he heard terrified screams from next door, but immediately jumped over the boundary wall.

There Kurtley Meyer (47) from Lavender Hill discovered a woman with her elderly mother in her arms. She was screaming for help; her mother was passed out in her arms and was turning blue.

This was on Tuesday 7 February at 10:15.

Meyer took the mother from the woman, found a cushion for her head and then started CPR. “I learnt it from the television; there is a programme on Monday nights at 18:00,” he explains.

“I couldn’t let her die, although she was not breathing, there was no pulse,” he says.

Someone had phoned an ambulance, but it got lost.

Some minutes later, a man rushed over to the scene, pushed Meyer away saying “Wat maak jy? Jy weet niks.” Meyer says the lady had by then started breathing, but he had been chased away “like a dog”.

“I felt very heartsore about that,” he says. The man later apologised saying “Ek is jammer, maar jy kan nie hierdie dinge doen nie.”

Meyer is very emotional about the incident. “I was alone with her, I couldn’t let her die. It could have been anyone’s mother,”

Meyer explains his mother died when he was just seven days old. “She was shot by police... there was a gang fight in Parkwood Estate.” She was caught in crossfire. He now has eight children of his own.

The woman whose life he saved spent two days in False Bay Hospital, where doctors say she had an angina attack so severe that only two percent of people survive.

On Friday, Veronica van Vuuren (78) was at home with daughter by her bedside, when Meyer and this reporter visited.

Tears stream down his face when he sees her. He wipes them with paint-spattered hands.

Her daughter, Belinda Michael, explains that just six months ago her husband died in her arms of pancreatic cancer. Her brother too had a stroke and died in her front of her. She struggles to remember what happened.

She was supposed to have left on a business trip that day, but the night before developed acute bronchitis and postponed her departure. “I heard my mom call my name at the door and through the glass I saw her collapse. She said to me: ‘I’m going’. She was the colour of death. I was convinced my mom had died.”

Van Vuuren felt a sharp pain in her chest and also believed that she was going to die. “I was thinking I need to be here for Joshua, my grandson.”

Her knee is bruised and swollen from her fall, and she is still very tired.

Meanwhile, Meyer’s girlfriend is in another room. The family employed her to work as a part time char.

A teary-eyed Meyer says:, “I love you granny,” and she gives him a hug and a kiss.

Meyer says he does his best to help anyone. In Lavender Hill, he teaches the kids how to play soccer to try and keep them away from a rough life. His team is the Hawks.

Robert de Wet, Emergency Medical Treatment spokesperson, says simplified teachniques for lay person CPR have resulted in the public intervening more frequently and with increasing success. “Any form of chest compressions in an unresponsive patient, who is not breathing after a heart attack, can only be good,” he says, adding that in very few cases have chest compressions resulted in further injury. Rescue breathing is more technical.