On Sunday July 13, the Smiths Lake resident noticed her fireplace was low on fuel. 

Heading into her garage, she turned on her drop saw to chop up an old door frame destined for the wood pile. 

Sawing off one piece successfully, she then tried to feed some more timber through, unaware that the safety guard wasn’t in place and that the blade on the drop saw was in fact still running.  As her hand caught in the blade, Pam watched in horror as it cut through her thumb. 

Living on her own, she managed to undo the latch to get outside, where she screamed for help. 

“I don’t know where the voice and screaming came from,” Pam said.

“I’ve never hollered like that in my life.”

Next door, Lonnie and Belinda Dawson’s son Connor heard her screams and alerted his parents who were out the back. 

Until this point, Pam had only interacted on a very casual friendly basis with her neighbours, who had moved into the house a month prior to the incident. 

Arriving on the scene, Lonnie and Belinda worked quickly, ringing triple 0, stabilising Pam on the front deck with a blanket and wrapping her hand up as the thumb was merely hanging on by a piece of skin. 

Another neighbour borrowed the Rural Fire Service’s oxygen mask to help with Pam’s breathing until an ambulance arrived. 

Pam was then evacuated by helicopter to Sydney’s Westmead Hospital where a plastic surgeon worked to reconnect her thumb and tendons to the rest of her hand. 

Six days later she was back in Forster Private Hospital where both Lonnie and Belinda happen to work. 

They each check in on her once a day and have been taking home her washing, returning it clean, and helping with her paperwork. 

“It was pretty horrific. She was very lucky,” Belinda said. 

“She lives right next door to us and doesn’t have a lot of family around so helping with her washing and seeing if she’s alright is the least we can do for her.”  

Pam faces several months of physiotherapy to try to get her thumb working again but considers herself lucky. 

With her two daughters based in Sydney, “living on your own can be scary,” she says, tearing up.

“But when you have wonderful people like Lonnie and Belinda living next door, it is such a reassurance. I just think they are really lovely people. There should be a ‘Neighbour of the Year’ award.”

If only there was.