Kylie Vega just wanted to mail a package.
Within seconds, her daughter Nova, just 8 months old, went limp in her arms and stopped breathing inside a small post office in Clifton, Arizona. Vega was patting her back, not knowing what else to do, when Mary Schwarz, the employee behind the counter, came running out. No one knew that thirteen years earlier, Schwarz had been a nurse.
Unable to find a pulse, she immediately began CPR. By chance, police lieutenant Shari Aguilar was passing nearby and joined in the care before deciding to drive herself to a clinic, with Schwarz holding Nova in the passenger seat. Halfway there, the baby began breathing again. Days later, at Banner University Medical Center in Tucson, doctors operated on Nova’s heart, as she had been born with a hole and without a key artery.
Today, Vega and Schwarz are friends, and every milestone of the girl she calls ‘the rainbow of our lives’ is first shared with the woman who brought her back.