DENVER — An ordinary day out shopping with friends almost turned deadly for one woman. Instead, fast action and years spent working in the medical field allowed two cardiac nurses to save their friend's life.
"We realized very quickly that we had to do something. She wouldn't have made it out of there if we hadn't, so," said Cori Holloway, director of critical care and respiratory therapy at St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Junction.
"I think we're bonded for life," said Robyn Morgan, leader of medical imaging at Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver.
Working at Saint Joseph Hospital made fast friends of Robyn Morgan, Ariana Stemple and Cori Holloway. Despite Holloway moving to Grand Junction last year, the trio stayed close.
But a shopping trip last September brought them closer.
"It still feels like yesterday," Holloway said.
"It does feel like yesterday," said Ariana Stemple, nurse manager in ED observation at Saint Joseph Hospital.
The three were all out at Murdoch's in Grand Junction last September, looking to buy clothes and cowboy boots before a trip to Nashville together.
"I wasn't feeling well," Morgan said. "And I was looking for a place to sit down and that's really my last memory."
"My husband said Robyn's name very loud and I thought something had happened to somebody else because Robyn is usually the one that's helping people," Holloway said.
Morgan was on the ground. Holloway and Stemple rushed over.
"It was scary. But I just wanted to do whatever I could possibly do to help her," Stemple said.
Morgan had no pulse and wasn't breathing. She needed CPR.
WATCH: Saint Joseph Hospital Chest Pain Coordinator Jamie Hogan demonstrates how to perform CPR
"I was like, I cannot let Robyn die in Murdoch's," Holloway said.
Both Holloway and Stemple are cardiac nurses. Still, they've never needed to perform CPR outside the hospital. Or inside it, for that matter.
That was something Morgan had long teased them about.
"It's interesting that I've given them a hard time for that for so long and then the first time they do CPR is on me," Morgan said.
They jumped into action. And it paid off. CPR kept Morgan alive until EMS arrived to take her to the hospital. Both Holloway and Stemple said they're relieved they were close by when it happened so they could help.
"Very grateful," Holloway said. "I don't think she would have made it if we wouldn't have been there."
Waking up in the hospital, Morgan found out she'd gone into cardiac arrest and in the process, she fell and hit her head.
That injury is still healing months later.
"I still have a bit of a skull fracture, so I'm still recovering," Morgan said.
Like her friends, Morgan saves lives everyday at work. But she never expected her own life would need saving.
"No. I don't think you ever expect that," Morgan said.
But that day, that moment cemented their friendship into a permanent bond.
"I think it's going to be lifelong," Stemple said. "Hopefully, a long life."
All three stress what happened that day would have had a very different ending had Holloway and Stemple not known and performed CPR.
They say it's so important everyone knows what to do, so you can help if the worst should happen.
“A really important thing to know is that for every minute that a patient in cardiac arrest goes without getting CPR, their chances of survival decrease by about 10% every minute. So us having bystanders out in the community performing that CPR to get patients to the hospital is the only way we can improve survival and outcomes," said Jamie Hogan, chest pain coordinator at Saint Joseph Hospital.
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