LEWISTON – A quick-thinking neighbor may have saved a man’s life by grabbing the first thing that came to mind – a dog leash – as a makeshift tourniquet for the man’s bleeding leg.

From his hospital bed Thursday, Lance Baker said doctors told him he might have died had he lost more than the five pints of blood he left on his driveway two weeks ago.

He had been trying to maneuver a two-sled snowmobile trailer around his Malo Street yard shortly after lunchtime on Feb. 15. As the trailer started rolling down the pitch, he jumped in front, trying to steer it into a snowbank to keep it from careening down the street. Instead, it pinned his leg against a rock retaining wall, crushing his left calf.

He managed to get free, then crawled on elbows up his driveway toward his truck where he’d put his cell phone, leaving a bloody trail.

At the same time, across the street, Karen Kay Brown was eating a late breakfast and stood at her kitchen window.

She saw the trailer hit the wall, then saw Baker lying on his driveway. Thinking he’d been run over, she ran out of her garage. Noticing all the blood, she stopped and ran back into her garage and grabbed a green dog leash hanging there that she used to walk Buddy, a Chihuahua-Yorkie mix

When she got to Baker, he was lying next to his truck, his breath coming in shallow waves. He saw the leash and told her to use it on his leg. She said she planned to do that and wrapped it around his thigh, then fed the snap end through the loop handle. She lifted the leg and reassured Baker, seeking to keep him conscious while waiting for the ambulance she had called earlier.

“She kept saying, ‘Hold on, Lance. Hold on,'” he said.

For her part, Brown said she doesn’t know why she went back for the leash.

“I didn’t think through the whole thing,” she said. “I just did it.”

Brown, who has no formal medical training, works at Central Maine Medical Center’s lab. She’s used to handling blood in test tubes, but the sight of all the blood in the driveway made her queasy later, when she was locking up Baker’s home and truck and taking his dog to her house for safekeeping.

A trio of surgeons tended to Baker for hours in a CMMC operating room, Baker said. Despite a crushed artery, they managed to save his life – and limb.

Two weeks later, the calf is still more than twice its normal size, discolored yellow and purple. A gaping wound is patched and stapled with flaps of skin grafted from his thigh. He expects to remain in the hospital another week to 10 days, he said.

After that, he’ll need rehabilitation to regain use of the leg and foot. A roof inspector for a business development company, Baker said he’ll need to be back in full form before returning to work.

Brown has been to his room to visit a couple of times since the accident.

He thanks God she was home at the time and saw him injured. He also is glad she thought to bring a leash, he said.

“Thank God she had a dog.”