Saving a life sometimes could take something as simple as a call back.
Just ask Thomas Buck, an 84-year-old from Pennsylvania whose life was saved by a complete stranger more than 1,000 miles away – who called him back.
The stranger is Ashley Yasick, a 27-year-old banker in Delray Beach who checked her messages Monday, only to find a voicemail from a distressed Buck asking for help.
"It was one of those gut-wrenching phone calls and I knew right away I couldn't ignore it," said Yasick. "I called him back. Clearly he was trying to reach out to somebody."
Buck's daughter Leslie Notor said her father was trying to reach his sister-in-law, Audrey. He had been feeling dizzy and had fallen a couple of times before he decided to call for help.
"He said, 'Audrey I have fallen a couple of times and can't get up and I'm short of breath and hung up," said Notor, who lives in New Jersey, a couple of hours away from her father.
In Delray, Yasick didn't waste any time. She called the unfamiliar number back. But Buck, whose bloodstream was slowly becoming septic as a result of a urinary track infection, could not talk, Yasick said.
"It was a very distressing phone call. I kept asking him 'Where are you?' but he couldn't really talk," Yasick said. "I kept saying, 'I need you to give me more information.' He kept telling me he was in the back room of the house."
When Yasick got off the phone she turned to Google to look up Buck's phone number. To her surprise, the search yielded an address in Norwood, Pa. Yasick knew that calling 911 from her phone would just route her to a local police department. So she looked up the Norwood Police Department online and called their non-emergency number.
"I said, 'this is going to sound really weird but there's a man I don't know who may need help,' " Yasick told the receptionists at the Norwood Police Department. "I asked if they could send someone to check on him."
Officer Tim Kearney responded to the address and knocked on the door.
"He said he was having difficulty breathing," Kearney said of Buck. "It was a good thing that [Yasick] called."
Kearney called an ambulance and Buck spent several days in the intensive care unit at Taylor Hospital in nearby Riley Park, where he remains recovering from what Notor said could have been a near-death experience.
"The final diagnosis was urosepsis," Notor said of a condition caused by a life-threatening infection of the blood. "They had to blast him with ungodly antibiotics because he had been slowly deteriorating for the last week."
Notor said she found out about the incident through neighbors, who saw Buck being taken away by ambulance Monday. At the hospital, a police officer told the family how Buck ended up there. Notor said she called the police department asking for Yasick's information and eventually she pieced all the events together.
"This woman had saved our father's life and we really wanted to thank her," Notor said.
Notor said the family couldn't be more grateful to Yasick for taking the time to call back and help a stranger in need.
"I didn't understand the severity of the situation," Yasick said. "I was just following my instinct. In my gut, I knew he needed help."
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