August 4, 1998. A woman collapses on her trailer floor. Her heart is failing. Her husband is fishing out on Lake Erie. Nobody hears her cries for help. Only one creature moves to help her. And she cannot even bark.
Her name is Jo Ann Altsman. She is 57 years old, from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.
She and her husband, Jack, are spending a few days at their vacation trailer on Presque Isle, near Erie. It is supposed to be a quiet break by the water.
Early that morning, Jack heads out to fish on Lake Erie. Jo Ann stays behind with the family’s 2 animals.
One is Bear, an American Eskimo dog. The other is LuLu, a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig.
LuLu was never supposed to be theirs. She arrived about a year earlier as a birthday present for the Altsmans’ daughter, Jackie. Jo Ann and Jack agreed to look after her for a while.
The “while” never ended. The pig moved in for good.
The morning of August 4, 1998.
Jo Ann feels a crushing pain in her chest. She knows exactly what it is. She survived a heart attack just 18 months earlier.
She drops to the bedroom floor. She cannot get up.
She yells for help again and again. She begs someone to call an ambulance. No one answers.
In desperation, she breaks the bedroom window, hoping the noise will bring someone running. Nobody comes.
Bear does what dogs do. He barks and barks at her. But barking inside a trailer brings no one.
Then LuLu walks over.
Jo Ann will later say the pig stared at her face and made a sound like sobbing. Then LuLu turns away.
What she does next, she has never done before.
She pushes through the doggy door, a flap built for an animal far smaller than her. The sharp edge slices open her belly. She keeps going.
She crosses the fenced yard. In all her time with the Altsmans, LuLu has never left that yard except on a leash.
Now she shoves open the gate. And she walks straight into the road.
Minutes later.
Witnesses will describe it afterward. LuLu waits at the roadside until a car approaches.
Then she steps into its path and lies down flat, playing dead in front of it.
Cars slow, steer around her, and keep going.
So she gets up, waddles back to the trailer, and checks on Jo Ann. Then she heads out to the road again. She does this several times.
Here’s what makes it worse: one driver finally does stop. But he cannot work out what the strange creature lying in the road is. He is too nervous to get out of his car.
He drives on.
Inside, Jo Ann is still on the floor. Her heart is still failing. The clock keeps running.
Nearly 45 minutes into her ordeal.
Another car approaches. LuLu lies down in its path one more time.
This driver stops. And this time, he gets out.
The moment he walks toward her, LuLu stands up and trots back toward the trailer. The man follows her.
At the door, he shouts the only thing that makes sense to him: “Lady, your pig’s in distress.”
From the floor, Jo Ann manages to answer: “I’m in distress, too. Please call an ambulance.”
He calls 911.
When the ambulance arrives, LuLu tries to climb in beside Jo Ann. The paramedics gently send her back. Her work is finished.
Jo Ann never even learns the man’s name. He is simply a stranger who stopped, looked, and followed a pig.
Six weeks later. September 15, 1998.
Jo Ann undergoes heart surgery. She survives.
Her doctors tell her something she will never forget. If help had arrived about 15 minutes later, she most likely would have died.
Think about that. 45 minutes of a pig lying down in front of moving cars. 1 driver too scared to step out. And a margin of roughly 15 minutes between life and death.
How does Jo Ann thank the pig who saved her life? With a jelly doughnut.
February 2, 1999. New York City.
By now, LuLu’s story has spread far beyond Pennsylvania. Newspapers across America carry it.
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals invites her to its annual National Humane Awards luncheon in Manhattan.
LuLu, now about 150 pounds, receives the ASPCA’s Trooper Award for going above and beyond. She shares the spotlight with 2 heroic dogs.
Asked how she feels about the honor, LuLu reportedly just belches and shifts into a more comfortable position.
Jo Ann knows exactly how she feels. She tells reporters: “She’s our guardian angel.”
Here is the part most people never hear. The pig who saved Jo Ann was never meant to be her pet at all. She was a gift for someone else, a temporary houseguest who simply never left.
Had the Altsmans sent LuLu home, nobody would have been in that trailer to stop traffic on August 4.
No one can know what was going on inside LuLu’s head that morning. But we know what she did. She hurt herself getting out. She broke her own routine. And she kept going back to that road for 45 minutes until someone listened.
Heroes don’t always look the way we expect. Sometimes they have 4 short legs, a curly tail, and a belly scraped raw by a door that was too small.
And sometimes the difference between tragedy and survival is one stranger willing to stop the car and get out.
Has an animal ever shown you it understood more than you thought? Tell us in the comments.
Someone who needs to know, help can come from the most unexpected places, so never drive past a sign that something is wrong.
