By Judy Wakefield
Andover Townsman
ANDOVER, Mass. — A very healthy 29-year-old airline attendant who has run six marathons, collapsed while running on a treadmill at the YMCA in Andover and was in cardiac arrest for about six minutes while the staff and perfect strangers performed CPR and shocked her with a defibrillator twice.
Those Good Samaritans saved Stacie Logan’s life.
“I live a very active life, travel for a living as a flight attendant for jet Blue, ran the New York City Marathon on Nov. 4, and went into cardiac arrest on Nov. 30. How can this happen to a healthy, active 29-year-old?” Logan, of Tewksbury, says in an online posting about her experience.
Logan is hosting a fundraiser at the Tewksbury Country Club on Friday, April 12, to raise money for the Merrimack Valley YMCA’s CPR training programs as she is extremely grateful for the Y staffers who saved her life. The money raised will be used to teach CPR at youth camps, and to train counselors and teachers in the Merrimack Valley.
“This can happen to anyone, and it does. I had not even ran half of a mile on the treadmill before I felt faint and went into cardiac arrest. I fell from the treadmill, and thankfully within minutes, Good Samaritans working out around me began CPR. While they administered CPR, others were running to get an AED, calling 911, and doing everything they could to save my life,” she writes. “Our goal is to bring so much awareness to the importance of CPR training so if this ever happens to anyone else, they can be a Good Samaritan in the right place, at the right time.”
Logan spent a week at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, where medical professionals conducted every test imaginable. They ultimately implanted an AED/Pacemaker that she will have for the rest of her life. She will make a 100 percent recovery.
Approximately 350,000 people suffer cardiac arrest events each year. Of those, only 5 percent of people survive, and of those only 1 percent make a full recovery, Logan reports.
“She is a true miracle,” her mother, Pam Logan, also of Tewksbury, wrote in an email. “As you can imagine, our family will be forever grateful to the complete strangers and staff at the Merrimack Valley YMCA in Andover who stepped in to save her life.”
While the fundraiser completely sold out (over 300 tickets) in less than three hours, donations can be made at the event’s website: helpsaveonemorelife.org.
Copyright 2019 Andover Townsman