Chip Litherland, owner of the punk-friendly store Scavenged Goods, at 3229 East Colfax Avenue, woke up in the wee hours of December 3 with a strange fluttering in his chest. But he powered through and opened the store that morning despite the wet snow that was snarling streets and keeping most shoppers away. He busied himself with some organizing, and when he lifted a box of vintage vinyl to take out front for display, he felt something like a heavy weight on his chest. Too heavy. He dropped the box, fell over it and collapsed on the floor. He couldn’t pick the box back up, but he was able to get himself to the hospital.
“It came out of nowhere,” says Litherland, speaking to us from a bed at Denver Health. When he came into the ER, the doctors told him he was in Atrial Fibrillation with Rapid Ventricular Response — a condition in which the heart’s atria quiver irregularly, and the ventricles beat very fast. “They said my heart rate was spiking from 180 to 200 beats per minute.”
While Litherland is still undergoing treatment, he expects to be released from the hospital as early as this weekend. But what he’ll be able to do at Scavenged Goods, and when, is still up in the air. “So far, I’ve had a good friend of mine, Jason Franklin, jump in,” he says. “I trust him, and he knows what he’s doing, but he’s already taken a few days off to help. We don’t price things at the store, so it takes someone who knows what they’re doing to run the place.”…