“I would have been dead without him.” Gall said.
Now staying with relatives in South Charleston, Gall was living on Springfield’s Darwin Avenue when she was stricken.
She remembers talking to her granddaughter Kayla on May 1, but said, “I don’t remember anything until the afternoon of the Fourth,” in intensive care.
Thomas, 53, who found her that morning, said he tries to keep an eye on his older customers. Gall is 69.
In all, he has 270 customers on two routes in Springfield and one in the Shrine Road Mobile Home Park.
He said he’d often see Gall’s cats on guard on his early morning deliveries and sometimes see her sleeping in her chair.
But as he bent down to leave her paper on May 4, “I noticed she was face down on the floor,” with one hand shaking, he said. “I tried to open the front door,” he said, and then called paramedics.
Although Gall doesn’t recall any of it, blisters on her arms and elbows indicate she had crawled on the floor disoriented.
She since has been in and out of the hospital with a recurring nose bleed and said, “I’m plugging away.”
Thankful to her children, she also gives high marks to nurses at Springfield Regional.
Her survival led to a reunion with two brothers she’d not seen since a funeral eight years ago.
“We’re not going to lose track of each other,” Gall said.
Nor will she lose the depth of her thankfulness to Thomas, to whom she has sent a card of thanks.
“I had to express to him how valuable my life is to me and my family,” she said.
Said Thomas, “I was just kind of glad she was OK. I do what I can.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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