We will be reporting on lives saved around the world since our first documented life saved here in Singapore.
Keith and Survivor Wife Angela Glotzbach
Tana Bolus, an emergency room nurse at Norton Audubon Hospital in Louisville, was arriving to watch her son play at Floyds Knobs Community Center on Monday when an adult collapsed in the stands.
Dr. Tom Harris, the Floyd County medical officer and an emergency room physician, also was present. His wife, who is a nurse, and two New Albany police officers were there too.
But Harris said it was the defibrillator more than the assembled medical and emergency expertise that “probably made a significant difference in the outcome of the case.”
It was Bolus, along with neighbor Kristy Smith, who used a $5,200 grant from the Horseshoe Foundation of Floyd County to purchase five defibrillators and distribute them to local ballparks.
And Bolus was there Monday night and helped put one into use to get the spectator’s heart going again.
Bolus said the device gave the person “a fighting chance.”
“I never expected we’d be using it that soon, that’s for sure,” she said.
The spectator was taken to Floyd Memorial Hospital.
Update
Glotzbach, 37, an active woman who felt fine, was in the bleachers on April 20 in Floyds Knobs watching her 7-year-old son Cory play baseball. Then her heart stopped, without warning or apparent cause.
Glotzbach spent nine days in the hospital and, as a precaution, has had a defibrillator and a pacemaker implanted. She looks good, regains strength, smiles like she won the lottery and made it recently to one of Cory’s end-of-the-year school events. She’s also the mother of daughter Maci, 10.
“I can’t feel sorry for myself,” Glotzbach said. “There are people out there worse off. I just feel I’m lucky.”
“It was the best-case scenario, that’s for sure,” Bolus said. She could tell Glotzbach was tough, a fighter, that night at the game, as her heart was shocked again and again into behaving itself.
