Five months after his father died, Clifton Anderson was walking alongside his mother as they left a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans when her heart stopped beating and she collapsed.

Anderson felt hopeless and prepared to mourn again as he grabbed his cellphone and called for emergency medical help. But the 911 operator who answered the call wouldn’t allow Anderson’s grief to double.

Janae Perrier calmly coached Anderson on how to perform CPR on his 72-year-old mom, Norma – something the employee of the wine cellar at his hometown’s famous Commander’s Palace restaurant had never done. At the end of the three-and-a-half-minute phone call laden with New Orleans colloquialisms, Norma was breathing again, and paramedics arrived to bring her to a hospital where she recovered for a few days before being discharged.

“I do the best I can to cherish every moment,” Anderson said recently when asked to describe how he has spent the gift of additional time that Perrier – whom he has never met in person – played a key role in giving him. “Just cherish every moment – really, really cherish it more than ever.”

The leaders of the emergency communications center where Perrier works had her and Anderson open up about their fateful interaction because the 16,000 or so calls that those in her line of work handle during a typical year rarely end so positively. “They’re not always good outcomes,” the second-year operator said recently of the calls making up her workload.

The episode has also been a welcome morale boost for an agency that is forging on under new management after its prior director resigned last May amid accusations that he falsified an insurance claim and altered public records following an accident in his public vehicle.

As is usually the case, the 31-year-old Perrier had no idea what was in store for her when Anderson, 50, called 911 during the late afternoon of 13 February – the day of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras celebration. Anderson was a few blocks from where the city’s Fat Tuesday parades were rolling, and his mother had suddenly lost consciousness.

“She’s breathing,” Anderson told the voice who picked up on the other end of the line. “But she’s snoring.”

Perrier immediately knew that the snoring sound Anderson reported hearing meant his mother was not breathing. “That’s something different,” she recalled thinking to herself. “This is not, ‘She just fainted,’ you know?”

She told Anderson, with urgency in her voice: “We gotta start CPR on your momma.” Anderson began protesting: “I don’t know how to do that – I don’t have nothing. We’re coming from the parade.”

But Perrier persisted, saying: “Listen carefully. Lay her on the ground. Make sure she’s flat on her back. Place one hand on the breast bone right between the nipples and put your other hand right on top of that hand.”

A passerby helped Anderson properly position his mother and himself for the vital upcoming moments.

“Pump the chest hard and fast at least twice per second and two inches deep, OK?” Perrier continued. “Count loud with me. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.”

Anderson audibly followed instructions on the call. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, later adding: “There you go. Come on. Come on.”

After a few moments, Perrier asked Anderson to describe how his mother was responding: “Is she coming up?” He replied: “She’s trying. She’s trying. Come on, momma. Come on, momma.”

Perrier in the meantime had dispatched first responders. She was telling Anderson that the first to arrive would be firefighters when he delivered good news.

“OK, cool, cool. Relax, Mom, I’m here. Yeah, she’s breathing. Relax,” he said. “She’s trying to open her eyes.”

Perrier told Anderson his mother should avoid eating or drinking because that could present her with problems again. She added that Anderson should lay his mom on her side if she seemed nauseous or less alert, and they ended the call.

Firefighters showed up four seconds later. Paramedics came soon after and brought Norma to a hospital that treated her for four days for cardiac arrest. She survived the stay and was released back to Anderson, who said he was relieved to not have to endure “back-to-back pain” by planning another funeral after his father had died from a long illness in September.

Perrier said Anderson’s compliance with the instructions her employers have trained both her and her colleagues to give out literally staved off death for his mother. Other callers have been known to be profane and confrontational – including one who dialed Perrier’s workplace relatively recently, referred to the operator as “bitch”, “dumbass shit” as well as “raggedy ass”, and ended the 80-second call by saying “fuck 911” and threatening to sic a local television investigative reporter on the agency.

Perrier said she understands to a point that callers can be under immense stress because often they are reaching out during a life-threatening emergency. But she said Anderson demonstrated how callers who are “receptive to what’s being told to them on the line could actually save a life”.

Meanwhile, whenever Anderson isn’t running out wine bottles to the diners of Commander’s Palace and sometimes pouring their glasses, among other duties, he said he has been doting on his mother and feeling time with her pass as slowly as possible. He credits Perrier with that entirely.

“She’s a real angel,” Anderson said. “And she’s really the reason why I’m able to still have my sanity because I still have my mother.”