First Responders Finish Yard Work After Panicked Homeowner Suffers Heart Attack
Don’t you find it funny how people prioritize things in their lives? In their book “Making Great Decisions in Business and Life,” David Henderson and Charles Hooper used the example of a wedding reception to emphasize this very point.
They highlighted the case of a newly married couple who decided to skip out of their wedding reception right at 5 p.m. Why? Because they didn’t want to incur a late fee from their limo driver.
It seems crazy to curtail an important life event for such a small reason, doesn’t it? But one Hudson, Florida, man tried to make a similarly strange decision — and it could’ve cost him his life.
The story started with a homeowners association, one of the draconian features of suburban life. Gene and Melissa Work had gotten crossways with their association over the state of their lawn.
Finally, the homeowners association had laid down the law: Put down new sod on part of their lawn or face an exorbitant fine.
So the Works decided to do just that. Yet when the sod arrived, the scorching Florida sun had begun to beat down, threatening to shrivel the pre-cut patches of grass into arid mats.
Then there was a problem with Gene himself. See, the homeowner had begun to show signs of a heart attack.
Melissa quickly called emergency services, but Gene would have none of it. He wanted nothing more than to finish resodding his lawn.
“While he was having his heart attack, literally in and out of consciousness, he kept begging me to figure out the sod and have it put down because he didn’t want it to go to waste and die,” Melissa wrote on Facebook. “It’s ALL he kept asking about literally during a massive heart attack.”
First responders soon arrived and transported Gene to the hospital. The homeowner was soon stabilized, and normally that would’ve been the end of the tale.
However, it wasn’t. A few minutes later, the EMTs showed back up at the Works’ home and began to lay the sod.
“It was on our minds,” paramedic Tyler Romanowski explained to ABC News. “We saw what was laying out there. We are [often] concerned about everything but ourselves … We will kill ourselves to save everything else. We can all relate.”
“[Melissa] showed me the picture and said, ‘You’ll never believe it’ and I just started bawling, crying,” Gen said. “I couldn’t believe that.
“I didn’t think I just had a heart attack. I was just so grateful these first responders would come back and do that.”
Pasco County Fire Rescue Chief Scott Cassin personally congratulated the crew. They will all also receive commendations.
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