In early January, just two days after John Leszak’s heart went into full cardiac arrest during a New Year’s Day 5K race at Old Fort Niagara, he offered a few thoughts in the second Facebook message he had written from intensive care.
He quickly thanked “the angels” who saved his life, in the high-risk minutes after he collapsed. He also used that post to share his immediate dream, one day before he underwent heart bypass surgery at South Buffalo Mercy Hospital:
“My goal,” he wrote, “is to walk the Shamrock Run.”
On Thursday, Leszak and his wife, Paula, sat down at Undergrounds – a coffee shop along the Old First Ward route of that legendary Buffalo race – to say the plan is still a go. At next Saturday’s Shamrock, the Blasdell couple will be surrounded by at least 30 friends, including a reunion with several runners who performed critical CPR when Leszak’s heart stopped.
Much of the conversation with the Leszaks circled back to the same theme:
“I don’t feel lucky,” said John, 66. “I feel blessed.”
He describes himself as a person of deep faith. He is a eucharistic minister and parishioner at Our Lady of Victory National Shrine and Basilica in Lackawanna. His late father, a South Buffalo steelworker, knew Monsignor Nelson Baker, the famed humanitarian always linked to OLV.
So Leszak spent some time Thursday explaining his first New Year’s Facebook post after regaining consciousness, the one he wrote only hours after he made it back from cardiac arrest:
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