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 out her tongue.
The 18-year-old 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," Renz said, laughing. Then her expression turned serious. "I couldn't move the entire right side of my body."
A snapshot shows her 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 on Dec. 19.
"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."
Renz 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 was 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 for University Health Care. "But I have since shopped there," he said, and laughed.
Beth Renz 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.
At the hospital, doctors gave Beth Renz 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 a sudden, I miraculously could. It was the strongest feeling of relief I've ever felt."
Because she 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," said Dr. Robert Hoesche with the Intermountain Medical Center Neurosciences Institute.
On March 31, Hoesche checked to see how Beth Renz was progressing. "Show me your teeth. Close your eyes tight," he tells her. She was able to follow every command with ease.
Doctors at Intermountain Medical Center treat about one young stroke patient each month. They say strokes among youths are more common in Utah than the rest of the country, but they don't know why.
Ballet is a joy Beth Renz and her mother share. Anne Renz was once a dancer, too.
"What a gift, what a gift, that she is — she's here," Anne Renz said.
Blasingim and Littledike watched Beth Renz practice in the studio at the University of Utah on April 7. They gave her a hug after she finished 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."
The ballerina 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.
Email: hsimonsen@deseretnews.com