A Woman Married the Train Driver Who Saved Her Life. Then She Saved His in an Unexpected Twist

Mar. 15, 2025

A couple holding hands (stock image).Photo:Getty

Getty

In 2019, Charlotte Lay met the man she would later marry on one of the most difficult days of her life.

On a fateful summer afternoon, the British nurse, now 33, was getting ready for her shift — but “wasn’t feeling quite right,” she recalled toBBC, revealing that had decided to end her own life near a railway station in West Yorkshire, England.

“I’d struggled with my mental health since my teens and I’d been in and out of the system since,” Charlotte told the outlet.

While her memories of that day are “blurry,” she remembers a train approaching on the tracks where she was near the Crossflatts station. “I remember seeing a man getting off the train and starting to panic and thinking he was going to tell me off,” she recalled of her now-husband, Dave Lay, 47.

“He approached me and said, ‘Hi, my name is Dave, are you having a bad day?’ " Charlotte continued. “I said, ‘Yeah, just a bit.’ He went, ‘Okay, we can sit and talk until it feels better.' "

The Crossflatts train station in West Yorkshire, England.Alamy

Alamy

The next day, Charlotte was keen to find the man who had been so kind and comforting to her amid her distress, so she posted a message on a local Facebook group for anyone who worked for Northern and knew Dave. “I’d have understood if he didn’t want to hear from me, but I just wanted to say ‘thank you’ for giving me the time and for treating me like I was [a] human being,” Charlotte told the BBC.

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One of Dave’s coworkers saw her appeal and passed along his phone number. Charlotte immediately sent a text to Dave, who had been equally keen to connect with her. “I needed to know she was all right,” he explained. “I’d contacted [the] police to try to find out what happened to her and just wanted to make sure she was safe.”

Two months after first exchanging messages, Charlotte and Dave met in person for a coffee date. By 2022, they were married, with Charlotte 22 weeks pregnant with their first of three children at the time.

A couple embracing (stock image).Getty

In a surprising twist to their story, Charlotte unexpectedly saved Dave’s life. In 2020, he began experiencing back pain and she urged him to see a doctor. That July, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

Now, Dave credits his wife for making him take his ailment seriously. “I’d done 12 or 13 years in the motor trade working on cold floors and out in the elements, lifting and carrying silly things. I just put it down to a bad back,” he recalled to the BBC. “Charlotte kept saying, ‘Go to the doctor.’ I said it was just me getting old.”

Dave said a consultant at a hospital in Leeds told him he would no longer be alive had he not sought medical care and been diagnosed when he was. “Charlotte may say I saved her life, which I don’t know about really, but she saved my life as well,” he said.

“You don’t have to offer life-changing advice or say anything profound,” she explained. “Just sitting down with a cuppa can make all the difference.”

source: people.com