Dan, I’m sure you and I aren’t the only ones with a life-and-death West Sub story [West Sub is personal, Dan Haley, Viewpoints, May 6]. Mine is this:
In 2014, my husband and I returned from a trip to the D.C. area where he’d been hospitalized overnight with a heart event that subsided by the time we got to the hospital there. Home now the morning after arriving, it happened again. But I knew what to do and – we were one block from West Sub! I called 911 and, in an icy blizzard and zero-degree temperatures (this was early January), the ambulance crew wrapped him in blankets and rushed him to the ER.
When I got there soon after, they had monitors on him. Within half an hour, he coded. They whisked me and my daughter out of the room and resuscitated him. He lived another two years, long enough to see our last grandchild born and get to enjoy her. And for us to celebrate our 50th and 51st anniversaries. (It was the 50th that I hoped we’d get to.) We went on two river cruises, one to celebrate that 50th, the other so he could see the Great Wall of China and the Terra Cotta Warriors before he died (important to him!).
We also had a family portrait taken (important to me), a trip to Disney for half the family and saw our first granddaughter’s Bat Mitzvah. He had also urged me to have an adult Bat Mitzvah, which he got to witness and at which I talked about his dying and being brought back to life and that I was grateful that he pushed me to accomplish a “real” Bat Mitzvah.
He cried then, so I know he felt blessed to live to see that milestone, too. All that because West Sub saved him. If any of the docs who were there at that time are reading, this is a very belated and admiring thank-you to you who do this in your line of work every day.
We were lucky to have West Sub close by. This is a tremendous loss to our communities.