Offer assistance

A couple of months ago on May 18, my husband chose to start his birthday with our regular three-mile jog through the Bangor City Forest with myself and our two dogs. We had finished our run and were walking on the trail when he started to have chest pain. We turned around to head back to the parking lot as his pain increased. He had nitroglycerin with him so he took one and sat on a rock hoping the pain would decrease.

As I quickly considered my options, three adults walking their dogs came down the trail toward us. I lifted up our truck keys and asked if they would please get our truck, as my husband was having chest pain. The elder of the three turned around and pointed toward the parking lot and told me that it was just around the corner, and they kept walking.

We did make it to the truck and went directly to Eastern Maine Medical Center. Within seconds of getting on the emergency room gurney, my husband had a Vfib cardiac arrest. He was revived and spent the next 10 days in the coronary care unit. The good news in his case is that he has had an amazing recovery.

We are very grateful for the excellent care we received first in the emergency room then the catheterization laboratory and then the coronary care unit and the cardiac surveillance unit as well as the support of our church, friends and family.

The point of this letter is to heighten public awareness that seconds and minutes do make a difference between life and death with cardiac events. If we had been any farther down the trail or had not made it back to the car, my husband would be dead today.

Please offer any kind of assistance if someone is having chest pain or any other physical emergency. Anyone could be the one in need someday.

Susan Wolters

Orono

Don’t close Broad Street

I think that the proposal to close Broad Street is a terrible idea for a number of reasons. It would cause the loss of vehicular access to Pickering Square from along Main Street, the entire distance from Water Street until the intersection of Exchange Street, Kenduskeag Plaza and York Street. That is unless one counts the steep, narrow little alley, usually obstructed by a dumpster, and a vehicle parked in front of the dumpster, at the bottom where it meets the Bangor Savings parking lot.

Perhaps the city could consider the use of bollards. They’re very popular and functional all over Europe. Through the use of vertically rising or flip-up bollards across Broad Street at Main Street, and another set across West Market Square where it meets Broad Street, Broad Street could be left open for vehicle traffic Monday through Friday from, say, 2 a.m. until 5:30 p.m., and on weekends and holidays from 2 a.m. until noon for business and service traffic. At the appointed and well-signed hour, the bollards could rise or be flipped up to preclude vehicular traffic, leaving Broad Street and Merchant’s Plaza open totally to pedestrian traffic.

There are already more than enough vehicular restrictions in downtown Bangor — namely the archaic 1960s one-way traffic flow and a plethora of turn restrictions. We don’t need another street rendered useless to vehicles.

Michael P. Gleason

Bangor

Adjunct kudos

I would like to express kudos to Ed Rice for his Aug. 21 BDN OpEd piece exposing the community college’s abuse of adjunct faculty. I was also an adjunct in the community college

system for almost 10 years and can verify that what he voiced is true. I was one of those devoted adjuncts, working tirelessly, with the hope of one day becoming a full-time faculty member.

I was considered a “full-time” adjunct. This meant that I taught three courses, and each class usually had 25-30 students. One week, I kept track of the hours that I actually spent on coursework preparation, grading and teaching. My hourly wage computed to $6.50.

I love teaching, and I thoroughly enjoyed the students that I worked with at the college. However, it became increasingly clear, with changes in administration, that adjunct opinions were not valued and that our services were expendable. This was very discouraging.

This fall, I have been hired as a faculty member for the Onward Program at the University of Maine. I cannot express what a pleasure it is to go to a place each day where my experience, opinions and professionalism are valued and compensated — something that was severely lacking in the community college system.

Sara Sheppard

Orono