waking up heartbroken...
I had quite possibly the worst dream I've ever had, and I just woke up from it ten mins ago. I want to write about it here and now while it's still confronting me, before the distractions of the day erase the details and just leave me with the sence of it.
Every child I saw and treated/transported in Iraq met me face to face last night. This has never happened before. I've seen glimpses of patients from the past, dead faces, but never something like this.
I saw the child that I froze on, the one my partner needed to rouse me from my indecision and near inability to even recall what to do when we arrived at the gate to get him. I saw that kid, and I was hit by everything I should've/could've done differently. And suddenly instead of me driving the ambulance, and my partner holding the kid, I was both in the front and the back of the rig, yelling at myself for my driving, driving as careful AND as fast as possible, cursing the torn to shit road making the ambulance rock and buck and shake like a bull, holding the child because we had no childsized equipment, two of myself in deep arguement and frustration because of the feeling that this kid was on his way out- yellow jaundice skin, not crying, so small...
I saw the girl we fought to get in the gate after the gate guards wanted to close it up, covered in burns, her grandfather frantically praising us and praying to allah over us, for getting the girl in to our ambulance and bringing her to the hospital.
I saw the boy with the shattered legs who, so many months after we first dropped him off to the er, could walk without assistance.
and then I saw the ones from outside the tower.
The young men and boys, being taunted and called to by the other guy in the tower. The guy whose goal was to call them over to the fenceline so he could shoot them for coming to close. Him getting angrier and angrier and cockier and getting his weapon ready to shoot... me trying to talk him down, shoo the boys away, and keep him from turning on me.
I saw the other times when they'd come close enough to the tower to be heard-yelling for candy or soda or money, asking if we wanted to buy watches... the occational glint of familiarity when I thought I knew one of them from bringing them inside to the hospital.
Knowing somedays I'd move 50 patients a day into and out of the hospital. Knowing I couldn't have any way to know them all, crammed into the bag of the ambulance like sardines, just grateful to be getting the medical care- some quiet and stoic, some mischievious and talkative, some speaking english, some not... but knowing that the cost of moving that much human life in and out of the gate- was that even though they were my responcibility for a time, I couldn't count them as my patients. Knowing that even the friendliest of them could turn around and try to kill me or my partner at any moment, and I'd never see it coming. Never relaxing, feeling nervous, frustration would lead to arguements with whoever my partner was that day. Good cop and bad cop turning to angry cop and indifferent cop despite our best intentions.
Getting to the hospital- and being turned away, because there just wasn't anymore time, or room.
Finding out one of the translators at the hospital was responcible for the disappearances of many iraqis, knowing that I'd had lunch with him, shaken his hand, worked along side of him... wondering how many of my patients, my patients families, he'd helped to hurt, or hurt himself. And looking back to try to remember if there was ever a sign that I could've known he was the badguy. Any little telltale moment that I missed or shrugged off. And there is nothing, he was well liked among the whole staff.
But I can't help feeling like I failed.
And every single face confronted me this morning before I woke. Asking me what I could've done different. Asking me to take them somewhere, where the war wasn't happening. Asking me to do more.
And I wonder if I could have. And I wonder if I would have.
And I cried.