I was high as shit, having just smoked a pretty large bowl by myself maybe 30 minutes previous. I went to meet my friend at this bar, where we had plans to join up and bike home together. This friend of mine is a lightweight petite Asian who gets drunk off of one beer, and that day she had had five, so she was pretty impaired herself at that point. After she settled up her tab, we got on our bikes. I remember noticing that she was going a little faster than she ought to be, when as she was moving to get off the sidewalk and into the street, she was immediately T-boned by a car that must've been going 35mph. Right in front of me. It literally knocked her out of her shoes, and she was lying there on her back, unconscious in the street.
I got a split second of "holy shit that can't have just happened, there's no way that was real" before my brain kicked into crisis mode. I have a huge mental block about swearing in public so I never do it, but right then I found myself involuntarily yelling "FUCK!" at the top of my lungs and I threw my bike down and ran up to help her. I yelled at some dude to call 911, and got some other people to try and block traffic, and a crowd started forming around the scene. I was holding her head to keep her spine stabilized; she was unconscious and not responding to my voice, but she kept writhing around a lot and I didn't want her to hurt anything in case she had broken vertebrae. I'm not sure if it was the weed or the adrenaline or both but I had the sensation of a huge amount of people watching me, when really it was probably 10 bar customers at most. My friend's chest started heaving and I heard someone's voice from behind me like "hey man I think she's gonna puke! She's gonna choke!" and then all of this puke started filling up her mouth and I had to singlehandedly turn her over on her side while keeping her head and body in-line to protect her spine. She let loose all this orange bloody vomit on the street and my hand as I held her mouth open and cleared her airway. I thought for sure she was going to die in that moment, but then she was breathing as normal. I held her like that for probably another minute and then the ambulance showed up. I handed her over to the paramedics, and as I was talking to them and the cops (still very high), I heard her awake and talking while they were loading her into the ambulance.
After everyone left, I had to walk her shoes and mangled bike (which sucked because only one wheel worked so I had to prop it vertically the whole way) back to our house, which felt like it took forever, and then I got in my car and booked it to the hospital to go find her. The hospital was laid out really bizarrely and it felt like this huge maze trying to get to the ER from the parking garage. I finally found her room, got a visitor pass, and went into talk to her. In the end she was totally fine except for a chipped tooth and lots of cuts and bruises, but damn if it wasn't a stressful process. I still cringe at the memory, because I feel like I could've done more to help, or been a better witness, or not have been so stoned in the first place, but I guess I have to admit that I took charge and technically saved my friend's life that day. I shudder to think how much worse that would've gone if I'd been tripping or something, instead of just super blazed.
