Woman stung by a bee, saved by 20-year-old man

Never judge a book by its cover is more than just a saying, as community member, Nicole Morgan found out in her near-death experience on 28 April.

“I went to meet a friend at Cedar Square to collect a pair of sunglasses with my son, Mikey. As I was about to pull my bag over my shoulder while we were standing saying our goodbyes, I suddenly felt a sensation like I was being burnt by a hot poker. I looked under my arm only to realise that I had been stung by a bee,” Morgan explained.

She added that she didn’t know how she should go about removing it, which was when her friend quickly scraped it off and asked if she was allergic. Morgan said she was not, but her friend offered her a prophylactic regardless.

For some reason, Morgan did not leave the shopping centre immediately and decided to buy her son lunch. “As I was walking in the store’s aisle to pay for what we had bought, I was suddenly overcome by a feeling of complete panic. As my hands started throbbing, so did my heart, head and ears – in fact my entire body for that matter – along with a feeling that I could not breathe. I said to Mikey we had to go,” she said.

Morgan added that she immediately called a friend who didn’t answer, and she then contacted her husband. “I explained to my husband that I was having a very bad reaction to a bee sting and that I could not breathe and was panicking and did not know what to do. He said I should go to the chemist, but at this stage I could hardly breathe and had to sit down in the walkway,” she said.

At that moment, people started flocking to Morgan, asking what was wrong but no one could help her. When she thought everything was over, a young man, Obakeng Seutane came running towards her and knelt down, asking what had happened and if he could help.

“I told him that I had been stung by a bee and that I needed to get to the hospital and then I became unconscious. This took about four minutes from the start of the anaphylactic shock in the store, to the point where I became unconscious in the walkway at Cedar Square. “This man young man dispersed the crowd me and put my hands behind my head to help open up my constricted airway,” Morgan explained.

Seutane then drove Morgan to Life Fourways Hospital where she was put in a wheelchair and taken to the emergency room and was administered a series of adrenaline shots into her chest, as well as a variety of antihistamines.

“Although I had regained consciousness, I was unable to recall anything at all from the time I fell unconscious at Cedar Square until I woke up in ICU at 7.30pm that night. I remember thinking to myself, ‘wow, I am actually here. I am alive’. And it was all thanks to my son, whose terrified face caught Obakeng’s eye as he was walking past on his way to gym with his earphones on and decided that we needed his help,” Morgan said.

“I was privileged enough to meet Obakeng with my family to thank him in person for going out of his way to save my life and tell him how truly amazing he was for being able to think so extremely clearly when no one else was able to.”