Saving a Well-earned Retirement
As a patient at Littleton Adventist Hospital, Rod Street’s sudden chest pains signaled a Rapid Response Team that saved his life.
Littleton resident Rod Street spent 45 years working in sales and engineering, helping water treatment facilities run more smoothly. Today, he’s retired with Annie, his wife of 55 years. Together, they enjoy the fruits of their labor, spending time reading, gardening and participating daily in water aerobics.
Rod also spends time each week helping his local hospital run more smoothly. For the past four years, he has volunteered at Littleton Adventist Hospital, which is part of the Centura Health system and a participant in the Colorado 100k Lives Campaign.
“I deliver the mail every Tuesday,” says Rod. “With the recent renovation, I can tell you that means a lot of walking.”
“I’m thankful for a job that let’s me contribute,” he says. It was Rod’s recent visit to Littleton as a patient that has him most thankful.
Rod was a patient at Littleton for a hip replacement, an operation that had him in the hospital recovering for five days. The morning he was to leave the hospital, Rod was sitting in a chair, while Annie was packing his things. Suddenly, he began to experience chest pain.
“I had had it before, while mowing the lawn and things like that, so I thought it would pass,” said Rod.
A nurse walked into the room and observed Rod’s declining condition. “When I went into the room, everything just clicked,” said Shelly Burkett, RN. “I thought, ‘This is not the person I know.’ There had been a huge change in his appearance and his abilities, and he was very pale.”
Immediately Shelly activated the hospital’s Rapid Response Team, which determined Rod was having a heart attack. They got Rod into the catheter lab within minutes and deployed a stent to help the blood flow past the blockage in his heart.
The incident kept him in the hospital for a few days more, but eventually Rod and Annie got back to their life. He says he still thinks about what might have happened if Shelly hadn’t noticed his condition that day and let him leave the hospital.
“I doubt Annie would’ve been able to get me back in time,” he says. “I can’t speak highly enough about the people at Littleton and how quickly they responded. They were there in an instant, and that saved my life.”
