‘I’m at peace.’ It was a small detour on their patient’s final trip to the hospital

These paramedics went “above and beyond,” just by stopping off at the beach.

Paramedics in Queensland, Australia gave a palliative care patient one last visit to the beach, twice in one week, and “she was just ecstatic,” paramedic Graeme Cooper told ABC News.

Cooper and Danielle Kellam are paramedics in the town of Hervey Bay, just over 100 miles north of Brisbane on the country’s eastern seaboard. They first stopped off for a look at the ocean on what was supposed to be the patient’s final trip back home before she died, according to the Courier Mail.

The beach and the town’s esplanade had been the woman’s and her late husband’s favorite parts of living in Hervey Bay. When she saw them again, she told Cooper and Kellam, “I’m at peace,” the Courier Mail reported.

But on Wednesday, the same pair of paramedics got the call to take her back to the hospital, and Cooper asked the woman if she wanted to get one more last look, according to the Fraser Coast Chronicle. This time, he actually got the woman out of the truck to a viewing spot overlooking Hervey Bay, which feeds out into the Coral Sea and eventually the South Pacific.

He also put some sand and ocean water in a motion sickness bag, so the patient could not only see the ocean, but put her hand in the bag and feel it one more time, too.

“If you’re sensitive to your surroundings and what’s going on and you can seize on a small window of opportunity, take it,” Cooper told ABC News.

As of Thursday at 11 a.m., the ambulance service’s original Facebook post with the photo of Cooper and the patient looking at the sea had drawn more than 62,000 reactions and more than 20,000 shares.

Kellam shot the now-viral photo, and told the Courier Mail, “It was exactly Graeme. He’s that sort of person all the time; it was the epitome of Graeme. That’s why I took the photo, but it’s also what we do.”

This story was originally published November 24, 2017 at 12:53 PM with the headline "‘I’m at peace.’ It was a small detour on their patient’s final trip to the hospital."