East end resident thanks rescuers for her ‘new lease on life’
Laurie Neave was preparing to have friends over to her east Hamilton home for dinner on the last Sunday in July when she started to feel ill.
Her husband, Dennis Gates, convinced her that all was prepared for their dinner party and she should go upstairs to rest for awhile.
Not long afterward, Gates went to check on Neave, took one look at her and called 911.
Neave says her symptoms came on suddenly — “heart burn, pain in my jaw, down my left arm, sweating like crazy and sick to my stomach. “
Firefighters and paramedics were there within two minutes. Luckily, they had been just around the corner on another call.
Neave believes that the fast action of those first responders and hospital staff are the reason she’s alive today.
On Friday, she, her husband and their daughter, Lisa Neave, 24, visited station No. 6 at Barton Street East and Wentworth Street North to say thank you to those first responders, whom she describes as gracious, professional, loving and kind at a time when she really needed it.
“Although it’s what they do every day, to me it’s important. They saved my life. Now I have a new lease on life”
When paramedics and firefighters arrived, she tried to get up to meet them but then fell. That’s when she lost consciousness and her heart stopped, Neave recalled.
Paramedic Rachel De Young said the team started doing CPR with the patient’s heart quivering.
“Whenever we did CPR, it would start stabilizing her heart and she’d start waking up,” De Young said.
They’d stop, but Neave’s heart would keep quivering.
“We ultimately shocked her out of the rhythm and then we did a couple more minutes of CPR just to stabilize her heart,” De Young said.
Firefighter Kevin Waycik travelled with Neaves to Hamilton General, continuing CPR all the way.
She remembers trying to push Waycik off her because she didn’t know what was going on.
Neave, whose father died of a heart attack at the age of 50, knows that much of her condition is genetic, but believes her lifestyle had a lot to do with the timing of her attack.
The human resources worker, who recently moved to Hamilton from Mississauga, admits that the past year has been quite stressful having lost her mother and a very good friend to cancer.
Neave says she has already started eating better and exercising more. She plans to start a support group for people who have survived heart attacks.