Mom’s Car Saved By Strangers While She's in ER
When Kaylee Goemans’ parking meter was about to run out while she was in the hospital tending to her sick newborn son, she reached out to her Facebook moms group and got support that she tells Yahoo Parenting has “completely changed” her life. (Photo: Kaylee Goemans)
The “NEW Barrie moms everything buy and swap” private Facebook group is used mostly by its 6,500 members for shopping. But when Barrie, Ontario, mother-of-three Kaylee Goemans reached out on the site July 13 to ask about meter parking — from the hospital in her hometown, where she’d rushed her 6-week-old-son, Dominic, who was suffering from complications of an intestine disorder — her question got an unexpectedly huge, and heartwarming, response that continues to this day.
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“Will I get towed or just a ticket?” wrote Goemans, who told Today on Tuesday that she couldn’t afford the $15 parking fee on the hospital’s lot because she’d lost her job when she was 28 weeks pregnant and the family has been on a tight budget ever since. “I can’t leave my newborn to run out, and we didn’t expect to be this long.”
(Photo: Kaylee Goemans)
Goemans tells Yahoo Parenting that all she hoped to get from the post (sent 15 minutes before her meter was due to run out) was “an answer that I’d get a ticket and not get towed, but my post just blew up.”
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Indeed, women she’d never met immediately began to fill the meter for her and offered to bring over coffee or food and even just give her a hug. “It was a huge relief,” says the 27-year-old former retail sales clerk. “Even now, I’m still completely overwhelmed. These people were pretty much strangers but they have even offered to babysit for free, let me park in their driveway near the hospital in the future, and one even dropped off a hospital parking pass that I can use for two weeks.”
Baby Dominic was rushed to the ER with a medical emergency while strangers rushed to help his mom Kaylee Goemans pay her parking meter. (Photo: Kaylee Goemans)
Goemans says that at the end of the nine-hour ordeal at the ER with Dominic (who’ll likely need bowel surgery in the future), there was a full five hours left on her car’s meter.
The thoughtful outreach from fellow moms has “meant everything,” says the mother, a member of the group for only about a year. “When you are completely overwhelmed, especially with a newborn, your world is turned upside down. Knowing now that I have this group completely empathetic to my situation — and willing to take five minutes out of their day to allow me to focus on Dominic rather than stressing out about my car being towed — has made this whole medical saga a lot easier.”
One of the women who reached out to Goemans after seeing her original post tells Yahoo Parenting that she just couldn’t ignore it. Rachel Banks lives around the corner from the hospital and offered to fill the meter and bring over coffee or whatever the mom and son needed — and even shared her phone number with Goemans, who she’d never met. “I couldn’t not help Kay when I saw her post,” says Banks. “The last thing anyone needs to worry about when they are at the hospital with a sick baby is their car getting towed or ticketed. Driving over to the hospital and putting money in the parking meter was the right thing to do so she could put all her focus on taking care of her family in a crisis. It was good for my kids to come with me as well, as it’s one thing to teach them about helping others but we all know they learn better by actually doing.”
All of the support has touched Goemans so much that she’s printed out the touching messages she received from the group, and plans to frame them and hang them up in Dominic’s nursery. “I cried reading some of the comments,” admits. “It’s just so nice knowing that you have all of these women around you. They’ve completely changed my life and made this experience so much less stressful. Knowing that I have them behind me in so many aspects is a blessing.”
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