The collapse of Lynn firefighter Mark Ducharme at a recent fire on Oakwood Avenue has left him hospitalized but much better off than when he got to the hospital the morning of the fire.

He most likely suffered a heart attack while going about his job at the fire.

If his colleague firefighter Tim Leighton hadn’t broken his fall from the ladder he was trying to climb, Ducharme might not have made it alive to the hospital.

As it was, he was worked on furiously by paramedics who used a defribillator twice to get his heart going after it stopped.

Implicit in all this is that emergency services worked the way they were supposed to work when Ducharme went down.

Not enough can be said about the speed and knowledge exercized by all those who placed Ducharme on a stretcher and rushed him to an ambulance for the ride to Salem Hospital – and for everything that went on to save his life along the way.

It is a miracle that he is alive.

We offer him our best wishes for a full recovery.

And we celebrate with his family that he was not taken from them.