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SALT LAKE CITY — In a dance studio on campus, Beth Renz flips backward over her partner's shoulder in an adept ballet lift that is at once graceful and breathtaking. Then, she pulls a silly face and sticks her tongue out.
The teenage ballet student at the University of Utah is all about friends, school, and her passion: ballet. She sees the humor in what was no laughing matter at the time.
"They cut off my favorite pair of jeans," said the 18-year-old, laughing. Then her expression turned serious. "I couldn't move the entire right side of my body."
A snapshot shows Beth as a girl dressed up for a dance recital in a yellow chick costume. That little dancer spread her wings. More recent photos picture her in her white Swan Lake costume.
At a technical rehearsal last December, she had no idea what would happen one week later.
"I could say 'um' and nothing else," she said.
She had just started her shift at Nordstrom Rack Commons at South Towne.
"I remember looking down at my leg and I was telling it with all my focus and all my power to straighten or bend or do anything, and it wouldn't," she said. "It just seemed like everything was going a thousand miles an hour."
Beth had a stroke. At Intermountain Medical Center, her mother's mind raced to the unknown and the fear.
"Is she going to be Beth?" said Anne Renz. "What makes her, her? Will she have amnesia? Will she know who she is? Will she love what she used to love?"
Two customers at Nordstrom Rack helped saved her life, good Samaritans shopping at the store. One of them is a nurse who said it was a fluke he was there at all.
"I was getting a gift card for my wife, so I was there to grab a gift card and get out — that was it," said Lance Littledike, a registered nurse at University Health Care. "But I have since shopped there," he said, and laughed.
Beth was checking out shopper Kristie Blasingim at a mobile register when the stroke happened. "My grandmother was a surgical nurse and she had a stroke while she was doing a surgery in the operating room," Blasingim said. "I think that just flashed in my mind."
Littledike and Blasingim recognized the symptoms and called for help. They knew time was of the essence.
"Time is brain," said Dr. Robert Hoesche, Intermountain Medical Center Neurosciences Institute.
At the hospital, doctors gave Beth a tissue plasminogen activator, or TPA, a protein that breaks up blood clots and then removed it.
"One of the doctors told me to talk and move my arm," Beth Renz said. "All of the sudden I miraculously could. It was the strongest feeling of relief I've ever felt."
Because Beth got treatment so quickly, she is making a full recovery.
"Approximately 32,000 brain cells die for every second that the brain is deprived of blood flow," Hoesche said.
At IMC Hoesche checks to see how Beth is progressing. "Show me your teeth, close your eyes tight," he tells her. She was able to follow every command with ease.
Here's what to look for if you suspect you or someone near you is having a stroke. Doctors at IMC use the acronym FAST: F-facial asymmetry, A-weakness in the arm, S-speech difficulties, T-time is brain.
Doctors at IMC treat about one young stroke patient each month. They say strokes among youth are more common in Utah than the rest of the country but they don't know why.
Ballet is a joy Beth and her mother share. Anne was once a dancer, too.
"What a gift, what a gift, that she is — she's here," Anne Renz said.
Blasingim and Littledike watch Beth practice in the studio. They give her a hug after she finishes a routine. The two good Samaritans said they received the best gift ever shortly after the stroke occurred.
"On Christmas morning, I woke up to a text from Beth's mom," Blasingim said. "It just gives me chills thinking about it — telling me how she was a dancer and she was going to make a full recovery thanks to the quick thinking of everyone at the store."
"That was really great," Littledike said. "It was one of the best Christmas presents I've gotten. It was really exciting, and brought a tear to my eye."
Beth brings greater determination to the dance studio, and appreciation for her life, and the people who saved her.
"If anything, it's made me want to dance more and achieve more," she said.
