Professional EMTs see disturbing things.
An automobile accident occurs in a section of the city where a good neighborhood transitions into a bad neighborhood. Vehicles from the fire station, police department and hospital respond to the call. One ambulance holds an emergency medical technician on his first run.
Clearing the intersection of wreckage requires four hours, claiming of the dead by the coroner consumes an hour, extracting the accident’s survivors and transporting them to the local hospital takes 20-minutes, responders arrive on the scene four minutes after receiving the call while the accident itself requires 12 seconds.
This particular accident involves two cars and a truck. A professional welder’s heavy work truck tee-bones a late model domestic sedan as the car crosses a yellow light. The force of the blow throws the sedan into a foreign compact, knocking that car into a pedestrian on the sidewalk and against a telephone pole festooned with posters for yard sales, church picnics and people running for public office.
The young man on his first run as an EMT blinks at the sidewalk. Across already stained concrete the blood from the dead pedestrian congeals and separates into a doughnut pattern, part of it is watery and clear and part of it possesses the consistency of instant pudding. The EMT’s jaw tightens as he attends the sedan. The dead hang limply in that vehicle, held in their seats by useless safety belts the women’s heads gently rest on the ceiling of the inverted car while urine from slack bladders, blood and fluid from inside their skulls pools around their scalps. The young man’s hands tremble when groans escape the welder as medics pull shattered glass from the welder’s face in the hope of saving one of his eyes. Impatient twitches play at the young EMT as he waits to attend the man in the shattered car. The first responders pull the vehicle away from the telephone pole to get at the man in the economy car, his breath and flesh ragged. Once the first responders reach him, the newbie intently bundles the man in sterile cloth, holding his skin down where the accident pealed it away from his body.
The seasoned police officers, firefighters and medical personnel on the scene operate quickly and professionally. These are men and women grown inured to setting their eyes upon the mechanisms of life shattered and scattered across dirty streets. The reactions of the first time EMT are more interesting to these veterans than the accident. To one degree or another, all the veterans note his behavior. Some consider abusing him later and calling this “teasing.” Some think about offering suggestions. None consider offering comfort.
Two experienced men work the same ambulance as the young man and they run the injured man from the site of the accident to the hospital. The driver intends to ridicule the young man when lives are not on the line while the other man – an EMT shift supervisor – intends to point out to the young man his errors, though they are minor. Both assure the young man they have seen many things.
Working in the back of the ambulance, the young man delicately holds up a section of skin peeled - but not severed - from the man to remove bits of glass and plastic when he sees something for which he is not prepared. He asks the veterans if they have encountered this before. The supervisor shines a pocket flashlight into the wound. Looking into the wound the driver and the shift supervisor experience genuine surprise.
Across the inside of the man’s skin are tattoos, none of which are evident on the exterior of his flesh. These tattoos appeared to be text – they come in rows of disturbing symbols similar in size and design – which none of the men recognize. Some of the tattoos skitter away across the inside surface of the bloody flesh and past the interior edges of the wound like roaches fleeing a freshly turned on kitchen light.
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