By Ty Walker
The Mountain Times
It was the middle of the day, 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 5. Laura Nelson was driving from Portland to Madras to work for a few days in her job as an educational consultant. She was driving 45 mph because she said. “I’m a stickler for speed limits.”
All of a sudden, as she was driving through Welches on U.S. Highway 26, her heart began racing and she started to feel dizzy. Then everything went dark and she blacked out.
“I pass out while driving and I come to not too much later from what I can tell,” Nelson said. “I had changed lanes but hadn’t crossed the center line, thank God. I kind of woke up and for a second didn’t know who I was, what I was, what a car was, what a road was. I was just completely disoriented.”
Little by little, she regained her senses and she pulled over to the right-hand lane and looked for the first parking lot she could find. Whatever dizzy spell she felt had passed and she was feeling better now, she thought.
Fortunately, it just so happened that Nelson found herself in the parking lot of Welches’ very own fire district headquarters. She didn’t realize where she had parked until she looked up and saw the sign.
“Of all the places for me to pull over, I look up and see the fire station sign for Hoodland Fire District #74,” she said laughing.
She felt fine at this point, had a drink of water and wondered if she should continue driving to her job in Madras. So she called her husband, told him about the incident and asked what he thought she should do.
“My husband said, ‘Why don’t you go into the fire department and ask those guys if you should keep driving or not,’” she said.
That sounded like a good idea. After all, who would know better than a station full of certified paramedics and emergency medical technicians?
“So I go into the fire station,” she said. “I rang the little service bell and a couple of guys come out. I tell them that a crazy thing just happened. I just passed out in my car and woke up in my car.”
Within a minute, more Hoodland first-responders joined in the effort, taking her into the training room and hooking her up to an EKG. They told her she had suffered a ventricular tachycardia blackout and called for an ambulance to transport her to Kaiser Sunnyside Hospital in Portland.
Ventricular tachycardia (V-tach) is a type of abnormal heart rhythm, or arrhythmia, that occurs when the lower chambers of the heart beat too fast. This can prevent the heart from pumping properly, which can lead to the body not receiving enough oxygenated blood.
“My heart was all over the place, skipping beats and showing multiple arrhythmias,” Nelson said. There would be no more driving to Madras for her today.
So instead of consulting with educators in Jefferson County School District, Nelson spent the next six days in the hospital, where she received a defibrillator implant that she must live with for the rest of her life. She is scheduled for surgery in September to fix arrhythmias that cause her irregular heartbeats.
Nelson said she is grateful to the Hoodland staff for saving her life. She sent the fire district a thank you card a few weeks after recovering from the frightening heart episode.
“They were so amazing, they were funny, they were kind, that day could have been so much scarier,” she said. “I cannot begin to explain how grateful I am for how seriously they took me when I walked in, and how seriously they took the situation when they realized what was going on with my heart.
“It turns out they saved my life. If I had kept driving, who knows if it would’ve happened again? This could have gone on for years with me not knowing what a serious problem I had.”
For Nelson, who is 51, this was the first time she has had any serious heart trouble. And the medics at Hoodland Station were there to see her through it.