Staff and shoppers at a garden store in Montco rescued a woman and her baby

But finally she sat down and the people around her kept her calm. Someone made her blankets comfortable.

“I couldn’t even talk. I started losing so much blood. I started getting a little nervous, a little dizzy.”

She managed to make a video call to her doctor, Dr. Shawn Mattson at Jefferson Abington Hospital, which delivered Colon’s last two children, happened to be on duty that day.

“She’s basically in a pool of blood,” Mattson recalled. “That amount of bleeding is … dangerous for her. It’s dangerous for the baby.”

Colon had to be rushed to the hospital. The people in the store came in to try to help.

“Women are like jumping out behind her and they’re like, ‘Okay, where do you want us to take her? Like we called an ambulance. What are we going to do? You want to go to Abington? What about Lansdale?’ ‘”

An ambulance took her to Jefferson Abington Hospital because it happened to be the closest. Mattson knew she was coming and alerted the hospital staff. Normally, a patient with placenta previa does not have a natural birth but would have a planned C-section because if the baby passes through the cervix in that situation, it would cause catastrophic bleeding, Mattson said.

Both the colon and the baby were fine, but she was bleeding profusely, so Mattson took her for an emergency C-section despite the fact that it was a premature birth, eight months into the pregnancy.

“What could have been a really catastrophic outcome actually ended up being from an obstetric, an emergency, she did really well,” Mattson said, crediting “the total strangers who … came to her rescue … to help her in this very traumatic moment, to help her stay calm and get her safely to a hospital and just kind of take care of her.”

Colon said the people at the store were “there at the right place at the right time. They literally saved my life because it could have been so bad.”

The day after she gave birth to her baby, she got a phone call from Mike Kratz, the general manager of The Rhoads Garden. They had sent her some flowers, a gift basket and a gift card. Kratz gave gift cards to the two shoppers in the store that day who helped out.

“It’s … a good situation that we could do something to help someone in need and have such a wonderful outcome,” he said, noting that he had never seen anything like it in more than 40 years in the store.

Colon and the baby are at home with the rest of the family and both are doing well. She recently went back to The Rhoads Garden to finally get her shopping done.