Emerson Turner is only 6, but her call to 911 helped emergency responders find her semi-conscious mother.

Friday afternoon, Dawn Turner, 40, was stung twice on the head by bees. With no history of allergic reaction, she thought she was OK.

Then, inside her rural Haskell home, she began to feel dizzy.

“All of the sudden I got deathly ill,” Turner said. “I tried to steady myself by grabbing the top of our stove. When I passed out, I fell backwards with the grates in my hands.”

As she struggled with the symptoms of anaphylactic shock, Turner drifted in and out of consciousness and couldn’t express herself.

“When I came to I was having trouble thinking clearly,” she said. “Emerson was on the phone. She was scared, but she was talking to 911. She was on there for a while, then she called my parents.”

It took somewhat of a team effort to get the ambulance to her house, Turner said. But it all started with little Emerson.

“She was having trouble giving them directions; then she told them our neighbor’s name,” Turner said. “A friend of the neighbor was listening on the police scanner, heard that, and called EMS with directions.”

Turner, a registered nurse, said the first people to arrive were her neighbors Steve and Linda Conner. Then, the ambulance arrived.

“When I woke up and someone was starting an IV, I figured I was going to be all right,” she said. “We were just so proud of Emerson that we couldn’t believe it.”

Rebecca Smith, spokeswoman for Muskogee County Emergency Medical Service, said it’s a good idea to have printed emergency directions for children and visitors.

“We recommend they write directions from their house using compass directions like north and south instead of left and right,” she said. “Also if they can include major landmarks that don’t change, like highways, schools and post offices. They should use very simple language.”

The current state of the county’s emergency infrastructure is part of the reason it was difficult for EMS to find the Turner’s home.

“This is really a good example of why we need to enhance 911,” Smith said. “It would have shown us their address when she called.”