“Baby needs food. Now.”

I was just getting the hang of applying joint compound to a portion of a wall I had to tear out in the future nursery, the floors were half-mopped and the dog needed to go for a walk.

The wild look in her eyes told me it could all wait until after lunch.

We piled in the car and neither of us said a word until we were in the front door of a sandwich shop downtown. Two teenagers were at the head of a line about five people deep; a thin girl with long blonde hair and a clean-shaven guy who was looking around nervously. They could have been a couple or brother and sister. 

Just as I was deciding on the cheese-steak, I caught a glimpse of the blonde as she hit the deck. She reached for a bag of chips beneath the register counter, then let out a loud sigh as if the wind had been knocked out of her. In a second, her knees buckled and she went down. 

Hard.

The grill behind the counter kept sizzling, the oblivious sandwich shop employees still working, while everyone else in the shop – including her boyfriend-slash-brother – stared at the girl for a moment. Splayed out on the floor, the girl’s eyes were shut and her arms extended outward at awkward angles.

A wave of panic rolled up my spine as I looked down at the girl. Memories of performing CPR on plastic dummies exploded in my head. What was I supposed to do first, check for breathing or a pulse? She was small, I would probably break her ribs. How many breaths per compression? Should I put her feet up, or raise her head?

Thankfully, I didn’t have to make any of those decisions.

She twitched a little, and the sandwich shop exploded with noise. 

“Give me your phone,” a large man hollered at me. “Give me your cell phone.”

Seconds before, the man was just one more person between my pregnant wife and her lunch. Now, kneeling on the floor beside the blonde girl, he was a savior. It’s one thing to sit through a CPR course to convince the Coast Guard to give you a captains license and another to get down on the ground with a complete stranger. Drop me into a lifeboat in the middle of a hurricane and I might take the helm, but when it comes to a stranger’s health, I’m OK taking a back seat.

“Give me your cell phone!” came the command again.

Fumbling, I reached into my pockets and realized I had left my cell phone sitting at home in our rush out the door. I saw a fire department patch on his blue jacket as he turned, frustrated with us, to another person and demanded their phone.

For the next 20 minutes, the man huddled over the girl, who woke up and told him why she had fainted: she had been watching an employee slicing bread behind the register counter when they slipped, cutting their thumb to the point where blood quickly soaked the bread. 

It was shocking enough to steal the blonde girl’s wind, then her consciousness. 

As it turned out, the large man asking me for my cell phone was the fire chief, who knew a direct number to the EMT on duty and exactly what to do. By the time the paramedics arrived, the blonde girl was sitting up and the employee was hanging onto her thumb with a blood soaked towel. 

We watched them both leave – I believe the blonde went home and the employee was brought to the hospital – chomping on our lunch in silence. 

“They should give the fire chief a free sandwich,” I said.

“They did,” my wife responded with a chuckle.

– Nate Jones