Jeff Marples was putting his paramedic's uniform on, just after 4am, in the Alberta town of Morinville, when he heard a scream outside. "When I opened the blinds, I saw a house in flames," Marples told CBC News. "And I could make out a figure from the top left window. And it was Amber." He could see that she had only one option, and hollered for her to jump from the second-story window. Marples didn't see that Amber Dyck was holding her seven-month-old son, Daemon. The flames were moving closer to them, and the smoke was getting thicker. "Every breath that I took, it just felt like I was breathing in fire," she said. She'd called 911, but help hadn't arrived yet. "I thought, 'I've got to jump,'" Dyck said. "So I did."
After a five-hour operation, Dyck has been released from a hospital and is recovering. Her first lumbar vertebra was broken, and surgeons have fused vertebra on either side of it to stabilize her back. She held Daemon close to her chest when she jumped, per CBC News, and she thinks she landed on a barbecue before hitting the backyard deck. Marples pulled her off the deck and carried her away from the house with another neighbor. Daemon wasn't hurt. When she looked at him in the ambulance, she says: "He just looked at me and he had soot on his face. I asked what [the paramedics] thought and they said, 'As far as we can tell, he doesn't even have a scratch.'" (More uplifting news stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
