ANDOVER, Mass. — A young woman is alive thanks to quick-thinking workers at a local YMCA.
Stacie Logan was going about her normal workout routine when the unexpected happened.
Logan had been running on the treadmill when she suddenly went into cardiac arrest. As she collapsed, the treadmill, which kept running, sent her flying onto the floor.
"I guess I collapsed on the treadmill, and the treadmill actually shot me off of it, and I hit my face on some kind of workout equipment, and nobody really knew what was wrong with me until someone flipped me over and saw I was unconscious," said Logan.
Logan says a few workers at the gym rushed over to help her, along with a couple of bystanders who knew CPR.
She tells Boston 25 News she was out for about six minutes and had to be shocked back to life twice with an automated external defibrillator.
Logan's father says they were shocked to get the call about their daughter's episode, saying she's a healthy 29-year-old woman who has six marathons under her belt, including one in New York just a few weeks ago.
This 29-year-old marathon runner is thankful to be alive after she went into cardiac arrest at the gym. She was out for about 6 minutes - but thanks to a few strangers, she was shocked back to life.
— Litsa Pappas (@LitsaPappas) December 9, 2018
The message she hopes will save other lives.. ONLY ON @boston25 at 10PM! pic.twitter.com/pLlCMbykY6
"That was the furthest thing from our minds," said Tom Logan.
Doctors say they still don't know exactly how this happened, but they did find scarring on one of the chambers of her heart, which could be a genetic condition.
"It was just kinda like a freak thing that happened," said Stacie Logan. "And it was just one of the circuits of my heart bounced off the scarring and caused it to short circuit."
She spent a week in the hospital, undergoing two surgeries to insert a pacemaker and a defibrillator in her chest. According to her doctors, this was an extremely close call.
"They said if I was home I would have been dead. If I was by myself, or they said if I was somewhere else and they didn’t have an AED or somebody didn’t know CPR, I would have been dead," said Stacie Logan.
Now, the family says they are forever thankful for the strangers who jumped in to help Stacie Logan. They also hope her story will inspire others to get trained in these lifesaving skills.
"If it means people learning about CPR and how to use AEDs, that’s our mission is to get it out there. We will both become certified immediately so that we can pass that on," said Tom Logan.
The Logan family now wants to find the other people who helped Stacie Logan that day in the YMCA so they can thank them in person.
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