What is that old Yiddish curse again -- May your life always be interesting...? Or something to that effect? There's never a dull moment in MY life, it seems. Today is no different.
My best friend works in an upscale department store at the new mall here. Quite often, she will call me shortly after she gets to work because something really GOOD has gone on clearance and I should get up there as fast as I can to snap it up, whatever it is. It's handy to have her there, I admit.
Today, I had a wide-open day for getting stuff done. Rick was taking the kids with him to run errands, so I went to the mall to sit at the food court, log onto the wi-fi and turn in my Saturday assignments for my class. Then I was going to get the key to my best friend's apartment so I could go there and work on my other big project. I trotted down to her end of the mall and found her extremely busy at the cashier desk. To kill a little time while she whittled down the line of customers, I shuffled through some of the racks and actually found a couple of things I wanted to try on. I took them to the fitting room nearest to her service desk and let her know I was going in. In a minute or two, she came into the fitting room to pass judgment on my choice (we do this kind of thing for one another; it's helpful to have an objective eye in such matters). We hemhawed about it, then I decided to try a different shirt underneath the jacket. I brought it back in, tried it on, and she looked at it critically.
Eventually she decided that it was growing on her, that I should probably go for it. She had an armful of clothes that she'd gathered from the other fitting rooms and was going to head back out onto the sales floor to replace them. I closed the door and pulled off my shirt while she talked to me. Then she stopped talking, so I asked her something. Suddenly the pile of clothes appeared under my door, quickly followed by a dull thump. She had collapsed in front of my fitting room door.
I'll back up here for a moment to let you know that she has an odd heart condition that causes her to have a VERY irregular heartbeat. Until recently she always wore a monitor, but the leads had caused her skin to be terribly irritated so she had stopped wearing it for a while. In the next couple of months she is supposed to undergo a fairly new procedure that hopefully -- hopefully -- will correct or at least lessen the severity of her irregularities. Anyway, she has had her heart slow down to almost stopping a couple of times in the past three or four months, causing her to faint and fall out. I wasn't with her the other two times, however.
Back to the story... I'm standing in my bra in the fitting room, and my best friend has just hit the floor. I just opened the door -- I didn't care at that point WHO saw me, because I was going to take care of my girlfriend. I could immediately tell that she was breathing, so I checked her pulse. It was fluttery, but it was there. A customer came into the fitting room just then, and I looked up. I must've made quite a sight, huddled in my underwear over a prone salesclerk. "Can you get me some help?" I asked her calmly. She immediately turned around to go fetch someone, and I began straightening my friend's limbs to try to make her a little more comfortable. Then it dawned on me that I wasn't dressed and that there were about to be a number of people converging on this room! I reached around into my fitting room, grabbed my t-shirt and yanked it back on just in time. I was SO thankful I hadn't been trying on pants!!!
She was out cold for probably two to three minutes, but she was breathing and her heart was beating, so I just kept stroking her face and hair and talking to her, calling her name. Eventually her eyelids fluttered a bit. One of the other salesclerks came in with a card.
"May I ask your name, please?"
I told her my name and that I was her best friend. "Oh, this must be your name as the emergency contact," she said, reading the card. "Pretty lucky you were here, huh?"
"Yes, that's me. She's going to be okay, we just need to give her a couple of minutes to get her bearings and get up." I handed the gigantic armload of clothes to her, since it was still piled on the floor next to us.
My friend's eyes began to open on and off, and then she asked if I would help her sit up. I helped her, and she sat against the wall for a few minutes. Then I helped her up to sit on a nearby sofa for a while, and I headed up to the main customer service desk to fetch a band-aid for her skinned elbow. She was also nursing a nasty knock on the forehead, which will likely be a bruise tomorrow.
The only reason the doctors haven't already done this new procedure is that they're waiting on the new piece of equipment to arrive that will actually let them do the procedure on her. I wish it would come NOW because this is getting ridiculous. I drove her home because neither of us thought it wise for her to drive herself home, and I'm spending the night with her in her apartment just to make sure she gets up in the morning.
Note to Blue & Red Fish -- call or e-mail me before you mention this to anyone at church, okay? Thanks.
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