Already
Can I still say that I never killed a man even if it feels like I once someone die? What’s the difference?
Every medic student sees a dead body eventually. A doctor will call a code after forty minutes even through the ribs stopped snapping a while ago. One morning, the engine crew will hold back laughter as you slowly shuffle into the bedroom of the old man who died last night ass, naked as old men tend to be, and place the limb leads to print out a monotonous strip of asystole. Maybe you started an ER clinical after the guy who hari-kari’ed himself is still in Trauma 1 and you wanna see if eviscerated intestines really look like sausages. There are too many opportunities to see a dead body before medic school is over, and if a para-maybe hasn’t seen someone dead before their eyes, well… that person is avoiding the sight.
Don't get me wrong. Dead bodies freak me out. There disconnect between their deadness and my aliveness is too much for my brain to comprehend. Once, I heard it was the basis for why most people are afraid of clowns and zombies. They look like us, but they're not us... not anymore.
I remember every dead body I’ve taken to the morgue, every full-arrest we declared at the hospital, every patient who looked me straight in the face and coded. I’ve seen death and dying, but I’ve never killed a man– not with my hands.
I’m sitting in the ambulance bay while I wait for a call, tucked inside the passenger seat of a rig. Tonight, the bay feels like a warehouse: cold concrete, the smell of diesel, rows and rows of ambulances freshly washed or on their last legs with their hoods popped and the engine gutted for repairs.
One of the perks of working with one of the managers is that I don’t have to post up the streets but get to hang back at the post and jump on the good calls: the ones that need extra hands, the messy ones, the fun ones.
A voice drops into the bay from over the intercom waking me from a half-assed doze. It’s shrill and echoes through the bay as unintelligible noise. “Tom!”, my manager and partner tonight, “GSW in Holdark.“ It repeats: “Tom, GSW in Holdark.”
I sit up at the first “GSW” and see Tom trotting over to the ambulance. He’s short and stocky, just like the baseball catcher he used to be with a matching high-and-tight salt-and-pepper haircut that makes me wonder if he was a Marine.
Tom slips the keys into the rig and cranks it. “I guess we’re going to Holdark!”
Stupid Holdark.
The rig stalls. Nothing good comes out of Holdark. My first day, a patient out of Holdark pulled a knife on me. I hate Holdark.
“This call sounds bad.” Tom winces as he leans into they keys trying to start the engine to this piece of shit ambulance. “I think they’re gonna need our help.” The engine grumbles to life.
“Did they say GSW?” I ask as we pull out of the bay.
When we pull up on scene, it’s surrounded by police cars. I jump out, and Tom lags behind me to grab the jump bag.
The smell of copper stings my nose before I even get across the street. I remember this smell: blood on asphalt.
A police officer steps onto the driveway with me. My gloves snap against my wrist as I pull them over my hands.
“What do you guys need?” I ask, throwing myself into the call.
Crime scene tape flutters against a breeze drawing the smell of blood further into the air. The smell fizzes in my head against adrenaline.
“We’re going to call it,” one of the medics says.
“He’s dead,” says the other. “He’s been shot more times than we can count.”
I’m expecting the patient to move, to sit up and shout, “Hey! No, I’m not! I’m just bleeding!” He has wounds all over his upper half, but neither of the medics holds pressure on anything. That’s when I notice the patient isn’t bleeding.
No blood spray, no oozing. There’s nothing but gravity pulling pools of his blood from his body down the driveway he lays against. No breath puffs out of his mouth or nose into the cold night air unlike for the rest of us standing around him.
The man is skinny and splayed out on the cold asphalt in one of those awkward positions only the dead fall into. It looks like a grim cartoon, and I have the thought to outline the guy with chalk to match. He’s still wearing his socks. They’re long and white and covered in blood.
An officer sighs. “He was running out of the house when the nephew shot him.” Blood feud.
Damn, I think.
He was killed. Damn.
His nephew did it. Damn it.
There’s nothing we can do. God, damn it. I put these gloves on for nothing.
Another officer walks over and shines a light onto the body we’ve all gathered around.
Yep, still dead, I think.
“How many times was he shot?” the officer asks.
We’re all inch closer to the body, as close as we can get without stepping in blood, each one of us tallying his wounds in our heads: the neck, the chest, one under this arm, one over here, one over there, another where his guts came out. I see six. One of the first crew mentions he can’t see the back but won’t move the body since it’s now a crime scene.
“Oh…” the officer says. A diligent pause. “How many times do you guys think he was stabbed?”
I look at the medics. The medics look at the officer. We look at the dead guy.
“Wait,” says the first medic, “He was stabbed?”
The officer moves the light from the dead man’s injuries to where the driveway meets the house. A knife sits in a small puddle of blood.
“Well, yeah”
“Then he was stabbed!” This would be funny if it wasn’t so gruesome. I bite my lip to stifle a chuckle. Sometimes bullet wounds look like stab wounds. Both bleed. Both get treated with direct pressure. Both can kill.
There are about three liters of blood on the ground and another soaking into the man’s jeans. He must have run out of the house only to bleed out in the driveway.
I sigh. Rough luck, man. I’m sorry.
I stroll over to where my partner is standing. He already knows the situation. This time, there is nothing for us to do. Tom pivots towards the dead body. Manny, one of the medics is knelt down beside the body gathering about twelve feet of cardiac printout which is still spewing out of the monitor. He wobbles, holding up the monitor as he struggles to avoid letting the strip drop into the blood pooled on the ground, let alone fall over himself into the puddles that are starting to congeal.
“What the hell is he doing?” Tom asks me but before I can answer, Tom shouts over to the medic. “What are you doing?!” This time, “the hell” is implied.
“I’m trying to get one without a heartbeat,” Manny shouts back.
My jaw falls open. What the fuck?
Catastrophe unleashes my mind into chaos. Alarm bells go off. Manny’s response echoes in my head and clatters against my thoughts. Dead people don’t have heartbeats.
“Shit,” Tom whispers.
Shit.
“Just leave it!” Tom shouts and with the next breath he lets a sigh out between tight jaw muscles. “Just go get the declarati
on!”
My eyes are locked onto a stream of blood making its way through a crack in the asphalt. I can see my boss through the corner of my vision, and imagine his thoughts are a mix of “You’re fucking kidding me!” and “I hope no one heard him say that”.
I start to rattle off rationalizations.
They’re probably agonal beats and aren’t compatible with life.
His wounds are too severe.
We’re out of trauma boundaries.
He’s bled out too much for us to fix.
Thought after thought flood into my head and my chest tightens against each breath I pull.
Not my patient.
Not my call.
Not my seniority.
Not my burden.
It feels like my burden.
I can’t move, not because I’m scared, but because I’m being pulled in too many directions at once. Start compressions on the guy. Pull out the cot. Scream in frustration. Hit Manny in the head with that stupid fucking cardiac monitor.
I blow a long breath through pursed lips. This feels like defeat. The rocker on my patch feels stupid now. “Paramedic,” it says, embroidered in green on white. Above it a symbol of an ambulance, a heart, the star of life, and a heartbeat.
He still had a heart beat.
Manny calls the hospital in the ambulance. Time of death: fuck-up-o’clock.
A firefighter walks over with a sheet and lays it down on top the body and spots of blood bloom against the starchy white.
Like CSI, I think. Then, I realize how close I am to a murder. This job is weird and right now it feels unreal.
I walk over to the rig where Manny’s partner is cleaning the cardiac monitor. She’s small, blonde, and wears glasses. This is the first time we’ve met. The wipes in her hand come away rusty red from blood after touching the leads.
“Do you need any help?” I ask.
She shakes her head and purses her lips to say “No,” but I take it as, “Not unless you’re gonna fucking un-kill the guy.” I take a quick scan of her face but I can’t read her emotions before she turn her back on me.
Keep turning your back, bitch.
“That was a bad call,” I say, trying to grab her attention and to open up a conversation. Blood, guts, death, defeat– this job sucks sometimes. If you consider the pay, this job sucks all the time.
She looks at me and blows a strand of hair away from around her eyes, bored, and rolls a shrug off her shoulders. “He was dead before we got here.”
I nod my head and turn on my heels. He was dead before we got here.
My partner motions for me to get back into the rig. There’s nothing we can do here so it’s back onto the streets for us. An officer snaps a stream of crime scene tape to let our ambulance bumble out of the cordon. I pull my seat into the dashboard and recline it back the precious inch and a half it gets, and I stare out the window. The roads feel too dark as sodium street lights push shadows across the dashboard.
Breathe in.
Don’t scream.
Breathe out.
Relax your shoulders.
Fuck.
“Does it ever freak you out…” I ask Tom, “seeing how people kill each other?” My voice sounds thick in the quiet nothing of the ambulance cab. It’s the same meek tone I had when I was a student: inexperienced, overwhelmed, confused.
Tom gives me some cynical, cheap answer which is both useless and callous.
“You get used to it.”
I lob my head in his direction.
You are so fucking worthless, Tom.
We keep driving away.
In the quiet moments of my life, I’m reminded of that body laying in the driveway and the smell of liters of blood on the ground.
He was already dead, I tell myself. I didn’t kill him. He was already dead.
