Tara Mattimoe / Times staff Uldene Nash holds her dog Tiny, who led a neighbor to Nash last week after she’d had a heart attack and lay on the floor of her home.
Posted on 02/14/2010 7:14:39 PM PST by Graybeard58
When Lee Riviere saw her neighbor’s poodle, “Tiny,” barking in her driveway and didn’t see his owner, Uldene Nash, behind him, she knew something was wrong, she said.
“I called and called him and he wouldn’t come to me. He kept making big circles around me like he was a herding dog. He basically herded me over to Uldene’s house,” she said.
Once at Nash’s house next door, Riviere saw blood in the driveway and on the back steps, she said. She ran inside and found 86-year-old Nash, who has been her neighbor for 30 years, lying on the floor, Riviere said.
“She wouldn’t let me call the ambulance,” Riviere said, “but she did let me call her daughter-in-law.
They came over and called 911 right away. She was having a heart attack.”
Nash, back home after several days at OSF St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria, said that she had been getting ready to take cans into town for recycling last week and had started the car to warm it up. She had placed Tiny inside, she said. While in the shed getting cans, Nash said she got dizzy and passed out. She moved in and out of consciousness several times after that, she said, but managed to drag herself into the house by telling herself over and over that if she didn’t get inside she was going to freeze to death.
Nash got herself inside, but as for calling for help, she hadn’t even tried to get to the phone, she said, and she’s not sure she could have.
Thankfully, Tiny led Riviere to Nash first.
Asked how Tiny got out of the car, Nash said she isn’t quite sure.
“The only thing I can think of is that one of the times I came to I went and shut the motor to the car off. I figure I must not have shut the door all the way and Tiny got out,” Nash said.
Asked why she thinks Tiny went over to bark in the neighbor’s driveway, Nash again said she doesn’t know.
“It was cold and he was outside. He was looking for someone to take him in where it was warm. That’s my theory,” Nash said.
Riviere doesn’t buy it.
“Tiny’s never out by himself. He’s never been over here without Dene. I don’t think he would just come over here,” Riviere said.
“I think he must have known what he was doing because I was the only neighbor that was home.
To think that little dog could bark loud enough to get me outside — that’s the miracle,” Riviere said.
Although she has only owned Tiny for less than a year, it is clear that he and Nash share a special bond.
“They brought him to us in a washcloth, cupped in their hands. I said, ‘Boy he’s tiny,’ and the name stuck,” Nash said.
Tiny was a gift for her late husband, Oliver “Bunny” Nash, she said. They’d only had Tiny for several weeks when her husband died, she said.
“It’s just the two of us left,” Nash said as Tiny leaned his front legs against her, waiting to be picked up.
Obliging him with a snuggle, Nash said, “He loves to play. He’s friendly with everybody. He thinks everybody is just as happy to see him as he is to see them.”
Looking into Tiny’s soft, happy face and knowing that he very well might have saved Nash’s life several days before, it is hard not to be happy to see him.
Nash’s son, Eugene, said he still can’t believe what Tiny did.
“No one knows how long she laid out in the cold before she got inside,” Eugene said.
“Her body temperature was only 77 degrees when they got her up to OSF. I don’t think she’d be here now if it wasn’t for that dog,” he said.
Eugene said that ever since his father died last year, his mother and Tiny have been inseparable.
“If it wasn’t for that dog I don’t know what she’d do,” Eugene said.
As for Lee Riviere — “She’s the best person on this earth,” Eugene said.
“You couldn’t ask for a better neighbor than she’s got there.”
Riviere gives more credit to Tiny than she does to herself, she said.
“We still don’t know how he got out of the car. It’s just a miracle,” Riviere said of Tiny.
“I keep telling Dene that he deserves a steak. I don’t care how little he is, he deserves a steak.
One of those with a round bone in the middle so he can drag it around and have it all to himself.”
“As far as I’m concerned he’s a tiny hero.”
Tara Mattimoe / Times staff Uldene Nash holds her dog Tiny, who led a neighbor to Nash last week after she’d had a heart attack and lay on the floor of her home.
Are the Pekin HS sports teams still known as the ‘Chinks’??
Not for several years, I’m not sure when the P.C. police made them change it - They are the Pekin Dragons now.
My experience with IL HS sports broadcasting goes back to the late ‘70’s....so I would expect that there have been some changes.....
Something similar happened on our street. A woman on the block heard her next door neighbor’s dog barking loudly outside her house. She opened the door and the dog ran in and pressed 911 on her cell phone (she had one of those Jitterbug phones with the big numbers) and waited til the police arrived and then led them back to his house where the cops discovered the dog’s owner had fallen and could not get up. The police said the dog was a hero and it was just a coincidence the owner had landed on bag of Beggin’ Strips.
O. Henry would be proud of you. I know I am.
One thing in the story doesn’t sound right: that the woman would not let the neighbor call an ambulance, but let her call her daughter in law who then called 911. Let me get one thing straight: if you are lying on the floor having a heart attack, I will call an ambulance immediately despite your protestations to the contrary. Weird.
Maybe it’s something about older people, a very similar thing happened to my 89 year old mother. She fell in the house and my step father, try as he might, could not lift her up. He wanted to call 911, she demanded that he not do that, so instead he called my sister who came over immediately and.....called 911.
All turned out well, she was just bruised badly, no broken bones.
A school in KS decided to change their mascot from and Indian name to something else less offensive. I suggested the Cinder Blocks because it's hard to offend construction materials.
Hi Graybeard58
Thanks for that information. I see that you are right. I guess objectively speaking it seems odd, but evidently there is that initial resistance to calling for assistance. Sue
Yes. My Dad, worried about the farm, cancelled a doctor’s appt. on bitterly cold Friday in January several decades back because he thought the doctor would admit him to the hospital, and a “Siberian Express” was predicted for the weekend. He felt he needed to be on the farm.
That night he was doubled over with chest pain in our entry way and asking me to watch from the house to make sure he made it to the barn. Mom asked if she should call the ambulance. No.
He made it part way to the barn, then turned around and came back. He said, “I guess you’d better have your mom call the ambulance.” He still insisted on walking down to the road to meet it.
He was in ICU for close to two weeks. Had to sell the milking cows off within 6 weeks of that. He passed away in September of that year. He had kept farming until Fall, as he had wanted.
Thank you for sharing that story. You tell it well! I guess self sufficient people are not quick to make a big deal about their condition, despite the seriousness of it. Your father seems to have been an interesting individual and I am sure left you quite a legacy. I love personal histories.
They changed it to “Dragons” sometime in the late 70s, IIRC.
It was the ‘Chinks’ when I left Illinois, for good in 9/78
I had a friend graduate from Peking HS in ‘83 or ‘84, and it was the Dragons at that point...I still remember as a kid going skating at the Pekin Chink Rink.
Ha. Peking <-> Pekin
‘Chink Rink’
WOW.....
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