By JIMMY GOLEN -- Associated Press
 WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) -- As the second baseman of U.S. Olympic softball team, Dot Richardson has to keep track of everything happening on the field: where to position herself, what base to cover, whom to throw the ball to, or who might throw it to her.
 As a doctor, she sometimes has to keep track of what's going on off the field, too.
 Twice in the past week, Richardson's medical career has interrupted her athletic career. And both times, she did not hesitate to put softball aside -- if only temporarily.
 "You'd think she already has enough going on with this game, and she goes into the stands to help someone," paramedic Steven Lajoie said Sunday as he worked the U.S. team's pre-Olympic tour stop in Worcester. "Performing CPR has a huge emotional effect on you, and when you stop, all of the sudden you have to come back down from that."
 Richardson had taken her position before the second inning of last Thursday night's game in New York when a member of the team's coaching staff yelled her name with an urgency that didn't quite fit the situation.
 "I knew by the sound of his voice that it was medical," Richardson said, describing how she dropped her glove and ran toward the commotion behind the first-base dugout. There, she found a man laid out on the ground.
 He had no pulse, he was not breathing, and he was turning blue.
 With another doctor compressing the man's chest, Richardson began breathing into his mouth, through a mask. The man, 70-year-old Sal Lamendola, opened his eyes -- but just for a second.
 He was pronounced dead later Thursday night at Sisters of Charity Medical Center on Staten Island.
 "Life is precious, and we need to live it to the fullest," Richardson said. "That gentleman was there because he was a softball umpire. He was where he wanted to be. God will take us when it's our time."
 Last week, during a team meeting at its stop in Plant City, Fla., Richardson and team trainer Laura Mincy went to help a man who had been in a car accident; he was OK. But even after breathing into the mouth of a dying man, Richardson never questioned her priorities.
 "If I never got back on that field -- if I had to stay with him 24 hours -- I would do that. Because, really, this is a game," she said. "But it's through this game that we are able to touch so many lives. And that's what makes this game incredible."
 Richardson, who stayed with Lamendola until the ambulance came, found herself standing by the road as the ambulance pulled away. "All of the sudden, it hit me: I've got a game to play," she said.
 The game had resumed with a substitute at second base -- a move several of the players criticized.
 "The game should have been stopped and all attention focused on the man," said catcher Michelle Venturella, who added that the team had gathered some things to send to Lamendola's family. "The whole team was very upset. We just felt that was not being very respectful."
 But Richardson said she understood why the game went on.
 "There were so many people who had come to see us play," she said. "We could not help him any more. He was in God's hands, and he was in the paramedics' hands."
 There's a scene in the mystical movie "Field of Dreams" where a ballplayer is forced to choose between baseball and medicine. With a little girl choking in the stands, he stands at the first-base line, knowing that if he crosses it he can never go back.
 "I cry every time I see that part," Richardson said. "So often, I have been on that line, deciding, 'Do I go 100 percent with medicine?'
 "I have been so lucky that I have not had to forgo my medical career," she said. "To be able to represent my country at the highest level of competition, I have had the best of both worlds."