Dr. Jennifer LaFemina is a surgical oncologist at UMass Memorial Health in Worcester, Massachusetts, but she's also a Little League mom.
The two occupations don't cross paths very often, but during a recent baseball tournament her young son was playing in, she witnessed the umpire, Korey Pontbriand, get hit in the throat with a ball.
Immediately afterward, Dr. LaFemina and her surgical assistant, who was there with her, urged Pontbriand to seek medical attention, but he got up and continued to umpire the game, like a man.
Phil Davis, president of the Oxford Little League, was also at the game when the accident happened and said that LaFemina sought him out to let him know she would be keeping an eye on the umpire to see if his injury turned out to be more serious than he initially thought.
Davis told GMA,
She came and found me in the fifth inning and told me that it looked like he was struggling out there and getting worse, so we were able to get him off the field at that time.
But as soon as they ushered Pontbriand off the field, and were making arrangements for someone to take him to the ER, the umpire collapsed. LaFemina began performing CPR, while Davis ran to get a defibrillator from a nearby fire station.
By the time he returned, she was able to revive him and he was stable enough to be taken to the hospital.
The story gets even better though.
At the same time that LaFemina was saving the umpire's life, her son was leading his team to victory by scoring the winning run!
Her son's Little League Team, the Algonquin All-Stars, went on to win the entire tournament.
A few weeks later, the town of Oxford honored LaFemina, her assistant, and Davis for their lifesaving efforts during the game. LaFemina took the opportunity to thank Korey Pontbriand for how he had encouraged her son, along with countless other kids, during his 10 years umpiring for the league. She said,
'We have the choice to be kind and good, and to try to make the world a better place, and even the smallest things we do have the largest and most long-term impacts on all of those people around us. We just don't know at the time we're doing it.'
She continued, 'So this is our umpire's legacy, and I would like to thank him for the contribution to my son that night and to our entire Little League team that night ... and really we just can't wait to see him back again on the field.'
