Life emergencies can happen anyplace, anytime and convenience stores get their fair share to say the least, so I thought this week I would share a few from my own past in Fl.. People who I will never forget, though I don't remember their names.

This one I will call Get the Finger.

A man's truck is giving him problem's so he looks under the hood and tells his buddy to turn the engine over. A few cranks later and he figures he will tighten his fan belt right then and there.

I'm working one day in a tiny little fast paced store when a man walks in and says I think I could use some help. I look up and this man is pale and sweating like crazy when I notice he is also holding his hand tightly and blood is dripping.

The man is obviously unsteady as he's weaving on his feet by that time so I slam a chair under his butt and grab for some paper towels and grab for the phone. To this day I still don't know the order they all were grabbed in only that all were done in seconds flat. 911 was called and while we were on the phone is when I found out he had severed his finger in the fan blade of his truck when his friend had turned the motor over.

He gets wrapped up in paper towels the best we could to slow the bleeding with his hand elevated. Then 911 asks where is the finger? And I'm like um I don't know I just have the body with all the blood. So I ask the guys friend (who is just as white faced as the injured man) and he says, "I guess still in the truck." 911 says get the digit and put it in a cup full of ice as the hospital may be able to reattach it.

I look dead at the guy and tell him go get your friends finger and I swear he looked like he was going to faint right then and there. (No way was I gonna get it.) So I end up all but pushing him out the door and tell him he's the one that did it so he had to go get it.

He comes back in and tries to give me the finger (or what was left of it) and I grab for a cup with ice in it and make him stick it in there. Thankfully the ambulance pulled up and off they went. I found out later the finger was a loss, too much damage so they couldn't reattach it. That was one time I didn't mind getting the finger as I would have died if I had run across it later in the parking lot.

Got Milk?

A regular customer walks in and comes up to the counter his face is red and his eyes watering like crazy and I ask if he's alright he tells me (all manly) "ah it's ain't a big deal" a little battery acid had sprayed out when he was putting the cap back on his battery (for some reason he was checking the level of fluid in it).

I have fits and tell him to get his butt in the backroom (some reason milk kept popping into my head) so I tell him to pour milk and then water into his eyes to flush them out. And he's a little resistant to the idea so I grab him and his friend and drag them to the huge sink we had in back and tell him to start flushing them out or I'd call an ambulance on him.

So I think mainly to get me off his back, he starts flushing them out and I made them stay in there for awhile and every time he would come out I would run him back in there to do it some more. By this time they were worried and his friend promised me they would go to the hospital.

A few weeks later he comes in wearing a patch and tells me he had suffered some minor damage to one of his eyes though he was happy he hadn't blinded himself. He had a close call.

Though he told me the hospital thought it was funny we flushed first with milk and then water. They said that milk was supposed to be drank for ingestion of battery acid but it had slowed the acid from doing more damage so it wasn't a bad thing. After that I looked battery acid up and found this information:
ANTIDOTES: For acid on the skin, flush with water. If acid is swallowed drink large quantities of milk or water, followed by milk of magnesia, vegetable oil or beaten eggs. Do not induce vomiting. Call a poison control center or doctor immediately. For acid in the eyes, flush for several minutes with water and seek immediate medical attention.

Monkey Girl

I'm closing the store one night and (my now ex) Derek was getting some ice for his cooler for work the next day (we gave away free ice from our ice maker). He's outside and the door is locked when a car comes wheeling up to his truck honking the horn flying off the highway. (I go to the window to see what's going on.)

A woman jumps out of the vehicle and all but throws a bundle into his arms and babbling incoherently. (I switch the lights on and unlock the doors) and he's headed into the store with this bundle in his arms. All I could really see was long brownish hair at first.

Then they got into the store under the lights when we both realised the child was covered in blood and I dived for the phone to call for an ambulance. The mother was hysterical and looked like she was pretty much in shock herself with blood all over her with two other children coming in behind her.

Derek looked at me with this little limp-rag in his arms and we both didn't know what to do. Then she started thrashing and blood starts pouring out of this child's mouth over and over. Clots of blood were everywhere and we couldn't see any outside injuries to tell 911 only that she had huge amounts of bloody clots coming from her mouth and all we could do is pray the ambulance got there in time and grab for a bucket.

I take the other two children and put them in a back isle with a pile of comic books and ask them to stay there until I came back for them. (I couldn't leave them to watch what looked like a child dying.) The lady seemed to come to herself a bit and told us that the little girl had had her tonsils removed a few weeks before and had only been out of a hospital for a short time.

Derek was just sitting there rocking this child in between bouts of blood and talking to her quietly while she held on to him for dear life.

Gradually the woman tells us that her daughter had spent a lot of her life in hospitals due to some disorder she had and that she had seemed to have been doing so well the family had insisted she come home this last time. (The whole time the mother is in a hazy state.)

That night she had woken to her daughter hemorrhaging and was on her way to the hospital with her daughter on her lap and driving at the same time, when she felt she was losing her daughter when she saw Derek outside the store she broke down and couldn't go on.

911 was on the phone the whole time keeping us together the best they could giving us what instructions they could with next to no knowledge of what was going on until the mother was coherent enough to get on the phone with them and told them the girls medical history.

And still he sat there rocking and soothing that little girl in between her bouts of blood loss. He looked lost and helpless but it seemed to keep her calm and relaxed to just be held and comforted by this big bear of a man.

The ambulance arrives and they had a full crew on board, they try to get the little girl and she went wild and wouldn't let go of him, with blood pouring the whole time. They have to forcibly get her to let go of him and hold her on a gurney while trying to run lines and assess her. The child couldn't even scream at that point she was in such a weakened state all we could do is back away and let them do their job of trying to save this child.

We all had tears streaming and were helpless to do anything but stand there with our hearts hurting.

The mother couldn't ride with her daughter in the ambulance not with two other children so she followed them the best she could. The last we heard that night was the child had been put on a Life-flight to a trauma center. We cleaned the blood from the store in silence and went home and just sat for awhile both thinking there was no way she survived.

Months passed and we would both talk about the little girl every once in awhile and how she had touched our lives. Then one day I got a call to come up to the store on my day off, there was something I had to see.

I walked in and the next thing I knew a little blond haired girl had shimmied up my legs like a little monkey and was in my arms. I didn't know what in the world was going on until her mother stepped forward and told me who they were.

Whew, all I could do was stand there and hug this little monkey in my arms close while her mom told me how they had lost her several times that night during her flight to the trauma center and how the hard working Life-flight team had brought her back several times.



The little one looked at me and I would never had known who she was, the last time I saw her she was covered in blood and I never even knew her hair was almost white it was so blond.

She wanted to talk to the "big man" that saved her that night so I got him on the phone and she had us both in tears when she thanked him for saving her life. He tried to convince her he didn't do anything but she wouldn't hear of it and insisted he was her hero because he held her while she was scared and rocked her until the mean people took her away to give her more shots.

I'll tell you it was hard to let go of that little bundle and it was hard to put her as the same child I last saw next to death.

Man it's hard looking back to the trauma but it was great to know they all made it through.

So i'll see you next week in the next Convenience Weekly and we shall see just what can happen from the other side of the counter.