COBOURG, Ont. -- A chance meeting with a Sun deliveryman saved the life of a woman on a cold morning in Cobourg last weekend.

Don Kent has been delivering the Sunday Sun for seven years and has come across his share of people needing assistance, but nothing like this.

It was in the early-morning hours of Feb. 15 and he’d just delivered papers at a seniors’ residential area in downtown Cobourg. It was -35 C with the wind chill.

“That’s when I saw through the trees some arms flapping,” Kent said.

He pulled into the nearby parking lot and found woman sitting on the pavement.

“When I walked over I thought she had some sort of weird pants. Then I realized it was her bare legs and they were frozen.”

He found her pants and one shoe nearby.

“I picked up her shoe and thought I could put it on, but then I realized I couldn’t even touch her — that’s how bad her legs were frozen.”

He called 911. Emergency crews quickly arrived on scene. Police believe she may have been lying in the parking lot wearing just a winter jacket for nearly two hours.

Her core temperature had gone down to near-freezing and doctors have said if she had been there another five minutes, she likely would have died.

But the credit, Kent said, should go to the woman.

“The whole time she was still trying to get up, even though she was so cold,” Kent said. “She was fighting the whole time, never giving up. I couldn’t believe her strength.”

At first, police suspected foul play. But after questioning the 31-year-old woman, they determined she had consumed a large quantity of alcohol.

It’s believed the frostbite caused her legs to feel like they were hot and burning. In her impaired state, she took them off.

“So she felt very, very hot and that’s when she removed her pants not knowing any better, only making the situation worse,” Kent said.

The woman is now fighting for her life at Sunnybrook hospital in Toronto, according to a social media post from her mother-in-law, Cheryl Thomas Mancini.

She has three children. Their father went west for to look for work with the “intent of moving his family there for a better life,” Mancini said.

While the grandparents looked after the children, the woman had a night out to socialize.

“She was supposed to stay at her girlfriend’s place, but unfortunately, an argument started and my daughter-in-law decided to leave before anything worse broke out,” the grandmother wrote.

The family is indebted to Kent. But he said the woman is real hero.

“She never game up at any time, so the real hero is her, herself,” he said. “She kept trying.”

pete.fisher@sunmedia.ca

Twitter: @NT_pfisher