So the other day (yesterotherday), this lady in the office where I work was having a normal sort of a day: getting coffee, shooting the breeze, showing off her new Richard Nixon doll, that sort of thing. (Personally, being a liberal, I think everything that followed musta been Nixon's fault.) Now this lady--we'll call her Lady A, although her real name is Louise Smith-Smythe Smithington and she lives at 1423 Smithenfield Road in Schmitty, Oregon, which makes her commute to Santa Monica pure hell--turns out that Lady A has a history of epilepsy, which means that she can't drive, which of course makes her commute from Smithlyville even more difficult. But given the whole epileptic thing, let's not call her Lady A, let's just call her Twitchy.
So, Twitchy. Turns out the epilepsy thing has nothing to do with what followed, it's just kinda interesting. (Like I said, it was all Nixon's fault.) Now me, I'm going through my typical day as well: getting decaf coffee (lest I get a little twitchy myself), shooting the breeze, trying desperately to banish the memory of that damned Richard Nixon doll, that sort of thing. I see Twitchy walk hurriedly down the long hallway, looking in each office and finding them empty (ah, Christmastime--the only time of year when you actually spend more time with your family than with your coworkers). I think nothing of Twitchy's perambulation, because of course I'm still suffering Nixon flashbacks. A moment later, there is a commotion from down the hall. A lot of hollering, something about calling paramedics and a heart attack.
"Well gee," I think. "That sounds peculiar. I should go see what it is all about. Maybe the Nixon doll has come to life and is attacking people." I mosey on down the hall and find Twitchy in someone's office, lying flat on her back and doing some up-tempo variation of Lamaze breathing. People are running hither and yon, the paramedics are being called, people rush in to tell Twitchy that the paramedics are on their way, and then people just stand around because of course no one actually knows what the hell is going on and that's what you do in those situations, you just kinda stand there and hope the person doesn't, you know, die.
Twitchy sees me. "Robert!" she says. "Do CPR on me!"
Me being me, I had to argue the point. "Hell, it's been twenty years since I took a CPR class, you really don't--"
"Do CPR on me now!"
In a situtation like that you don't really have time to stop and work things out. You can't take a second and say to yourself "Wait, if a person actually needs CPR would they be in any condition to say 'Hey, I need CPR'?" (Answer: nope.) So I got on my knees next to Twitchy and took her wrist, hoping that maybe I could feel a pulse even though I'm lousy at feeling for people's pulses so really all I was doing was trying to buy myself some time. But instead Twitchy took my hand and put it on her chest. "Do CPR now!"
"Gosh, I hardly know you," I said, and then got as far as lacing my fingers together in what I hoped was a place on her sternum that wouldn't crush her to death with the first compression. But with my hands there I could feel her heart thumping, racing, and now there was no question: if I did what Twitchy was demanding, I would probably in fact give her the heart attack she was afraid of. And fear, as I soon realized, was the real problem here, blind unreasoning fear. So I started asking her specific questions about specific symptoms, trying to get her to focus in on something, suspecting that that in itself might begin to reduce her symptoms.
But Twitchy decided that since I refused to compress her chest I was useless, so she turned to others and sent them scrambling for aspirin. (Helpful hint, learned later: if you are in fact having a heart attack, taking aspirin during the attack will not help; neither will lying flat. Someday you'll thank me. Just don't ask me to do CPR.) Turns out the office's first aid kit was completely out of aspirin, which resulted in further scrambling around, and the substitution of a pain medication containing a little bit of acetaminophen and a little bit of aspirin, but instead of swallowing them with water she mostly ended up just pouring cold water all over her face. (Which probably helped, now that I think of it.) And then she started sobbing on someone's shoulder and kicked the rest of us out until the paramedics came. By the time they wheeled her out on a gurney, she looked fine.
According to WebMD, it was a textbook example of panic disorder. Which makes perfect sense in retrospect, though when you're in the moment and you're not a doctor and you don't happen to know what the precise symptoms of a panic attack are, you're pretty much left just standing there with nothing more to go on than the vague instinct that maybe you shouldn't crush this woman's heart today.
As Twitchy was being wheeled out she asked someone to get her purse and her cellphone. The purse was produced and the Nixon doll was in it, providing one last surreal moment before the story ended (and, unfortunately, reviving in me all the horror of having seen a Richard Nixon doll). Twitchy went away to the hospital and the rest of us stood around, feeling a little better about the quality of our day than we had been feeling half an hour before, and with something quite new to shoot the breeze about. End of story. Go in peace.
(By the way: a surprising amount of the above is actually true.)
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