WORCESTER – Wendy Lyon considers Stacy Keddy to be her guardian angel and it’s easy to understand why. Keddy came to her aid not once, but twice.
Late in the afternoon on Aug. 1, 2023, a box truck on East Mountain Street struck the back of the stopped car in which Lyon was sitting in the front passenger seat and her husband, Stephen, was driving.
Stephen noticed the truck approaching, took his foot off the brake and told his wife to brace herself. The truck rammed the car’s trunk into the back seat and pushed the car 150 feet down the street.
Stephen’s head hit the steering wheel. His glasses broke and he began bleeding, but he was not hurt badly.
Lyon was unharmed, but very shaken as she remained seated. Keddy approached the car and informed Lyon that she had witnessed the accident and that she was a nurse at UMass Memorial Medical Center University Campus. She calmed Lyon down and remained with her until the paramedics arrived.
Keddy had never stopped to assist anyone in a car accident before, but she was at the scene and wanted to help.
Unfortunately, she left before telling the Lyons her name.
A neighbor gave the couple a ride home and the next day Lyon noticed a large bruise on her chest from the seat belt. For the next few days, she felt too tired to do much of anything.
Five days after the car accident, Lyon began experiencing body pain and her arms felt heavy. She was suffering from a heart attack and rushed to UMass Memorial Medical Center.
In her cardiac ICU room, the nurse manager of the cardiac ICU checked on her. Believe it or not, it was Keddy.
“She said, ‘Oh my God, that’s my angel,” Keddy recalled.
Keddy didn’t remember her at first, but she did after she noticed Stephen’s shock of white hair. More than a year later, Keddy still can’t get over how the two crossed paths twice within a week under trying circumstances.
“I think it’s amazing,” Keddy said while getting a bit emotional. “I think it was meant to be.”
“She was my angel,” said Lyon, a 66-year-old Shrewsbury resident. “I can’t even begin to tell you how comfortable I felt being there and knowing she was behind the scenes. She was so good to me.”
Keddy became close friends with the Lyons and she cooked Italian take-home meals for Stephen twice a week while his wife was hospitalized.
Lyon spent 87 days at UMass Memorial Medical Center and 14 more in rehab. She returned home two days before last Thanksgiving Day.
Lyon needed a heart transplant while she was hospitalized, but her heart was too weak. So she underwent two other surgeries, one to implant a temporary Ventricular Assist Device (VAD) which allowed her heart to strengthen and another to implant a long-term durable VAD which she still has. The devices are mechanical pumps that help the heart pump blood to the body. She still hopes to grow strong enough to have her name placed on a transplant list, but that hasn’t happened yet.
Lyon said she also had an arterial bleed in her hip, an aneurysm and blood clots while in the hospital. She lost so much strength, she couldn’t use her hands. Her cell phone was too heavy to pick up. She couldn’t stand up.
“I thought it was the end at one point,” she admitted, “but they were so positive and very good about talking to me and making sure I was OK.”
Lyon said she was determined to not give up. She wanted to be around for her husband, four children and four grandchildren. She also longed to attend the wedding of her daughter Amber this November in Princeton.
“The two things I want most in the world are to dance at my daughter’s wedding and to travel to my other daughter’s new house in Georgia and have a vacation,” Lyon said. “I think both of those things are going to come true.”
She credits her doctors and nurses with making her wish come true.
“Those people are my cheerleaders,” she said. “They pushed me and pushed me and pushed me. I pushed myself, but they were always very positive and they always looked for the sunflower in the snow.”
Lyon wanted to thank everyone so Stephen asked UMass Memorial Medical Center if they could visit. Cindy Cunningham, clinical coordinator of the VAD program, arranged for a reunion celebration on Thursday at the hospital. Several doctors, nurses and staffers dropped by to say hello. Amber was on hand and so were her brothers, Michael and Keith.
Thanks to cardio rehab and several months of physical therapy, Lyon has come a long way. She eventually began walking with the help of a walker and then a cane. Now she walks on her own. She still receives treatment at the VAD clinic at UMass.
“I think I’m doing OK,” she said. “I’m doing a lot better than anybody thought that I would be doing.”
“If you look at it week to week, month to month,” Stephen said, “there’s definitely a change. You see her getting better.”
Lyon credits the staff of UMass Memorial Medical Center with saving her life.
“Oh my God, yes,” she said. “These people went above and beyond. Every single nurse, every single doctor.”
Lyon didn’t eat in the hospital for quite a while, but she longed for a dropped egg on toast. So the nurses made one for her in the kitchen.
“I really think that was the start of the turnaround of me eating again,” she said. “Them making me that stupid egg because that’s what I wanted.”
Lyon’s daughter Ashley Kelly visited from Georgia and decorated her hospital room with pompoms and pictures from the grandchildren and she drew cardinals, bluebirds and robins on the window with liquid chalk. The Life Flight helicopter pilots train on the equipment in the ICU unit so one day one of them entered her room to check out her equipment. When he saw the window, he told Lyon that he recognized them. The pilots had seen the window each night they had taken off.
From then on, the pilots briefly hovered near her window and flashed their lights so she could wave to them before they headed off.
In June, Lyon attended a WooSox game sponsored by UMass for VAD and transplant patients and their doctors and nurses.
“We just want to help people,” Dr. Jeffrey Shih, director of the Advanced Heart Failure Program and medical director of VAD, said at the reunion. “That’s our job. We love doing it. Oftentimes patients become sort of family.”
Dr. Vaikom Mahadevan, chief of cardiology, was not involved in Lyon’s treatment, but he grew to know her and showed up for the reunion. He appreciated the impact that Keddy has made on Lyon’s life.
“That about sums up the ethos of UMass,” Dr. Mahadevan said at the reunion, “of doing everything we can for our patients, whether they’re in the hospital or we meet them somewhere else. I’m so glad she had this wonderful journey and we were able to help her with the VAD device. It’s so wonderful to see her in one year doing so well.”
Bill Doyle has been a professional journalist for 47 years, most of them as a sports writer for the Telegram & Gazette. He covered the Boston Celtics for 25 years and has written extensively about golf, boxing and local high school and college sports. He also worked for the campus newspaper when he attended UMass-Amherst. He can be reached at billdoyle1515@gmail.com
