LJ Idol Week 18: Inspired by another contestant
This week's entry was inspired by basric's work in trauma. Thank you, basric.
One Good Turn
A male voice screams outside the passenger window of my little white car. Then a motorcycle crashes into the door. I stomp on the brake, and glass from the window sprays all over the passenger seat. I cover my face. When I'm certain I can feel all my limbs, I shut off the car's engine. Then I don't know what to do.
It's an otherwise quiet Saturday morning in Austin, Texas, in the spring of 1988. Before the crash, I'd been driving home from a bar mitzvah. The car whose window glass is in my lap is my very first; before buying it, I'd commuted by bicycle to my graduate school classes. I’ve never been in or even witnessed an accident.
I step out of the car. The motorcyclist sprawls several yards down the road, his arms splayed like a fallen marionette's. I sprint to him and drop to my knees. He looks to be about my age-early twenties. He wears no helmet. His blond head is angled against his right shoulder, and a brown wool scarf constricts his neck. His thighs still clench the motorcycle seat. His jeans have been split at the crotch, and he's wearing nothing under them; I’m momentarily ashamed for him.
Instructions from my high school CPR class scroll through my brain:
- Check the victim for unconsciousness. Getting down on all fours, I shout in his ear, “Hey! You awake?” Even his closed eyelids don’t move.
- Call for help. I look up at the balconies of nearby buildings. A young woman yells down, “Don’t touch him! I'll call an ambulance!” She turns for the door, her pink bathrobe flapping.
- Check A-B-C: airway, breathing, circulation. I put my ear to his mouth and hear no breath. There’s blood seeping from his nose. His airway might be blocked, his trachea filled with clotting blood. Without A, he will lose B and C.
The young woman in the bathrobe runs out of the building. As I loosen the motorcyclist’s scarf, she shouts, “I said, don’t touch him!”
“He’s dying!” I retort. The man still doesn't stir or breathe. The scarf, his blood-filled nose, and the angle of his neck must be preventing him from breathing. I know a person can survive only minutes without oxygen. I know I could cripple him if I straighten out his neck. I don’t know how long it will take the ambulance to arrive. I’ve forgotten what my CPR instructor said about liability. Will I go to jail if I try to help him but injure him instead?
I straighten out his neck.
The woman says, “Don’t do that.”
The man, who has not breathed since hitting my car, makes a long, horrible gurgling noise. I inhale too. I wait, but he doesn’t inhale a second time. Kneeling beside him, I imagine his brain cells dying one by one. I was taught to tilt back the head to open a locked jaw, but I’m afraid doing so will injure his spine. I try to open his lips with my fingers, but his teeth are locked tightly. Desperate, I mash his nose between my thumb and forefinger to squeeze out the blockage. Nothing comes out.
I consider using my mouth as a suction device. There’s a small chance I’ll contract that new blood-borne disease--HIV--if I suck out whatever’s blocking his nose, but there’s a great chance he’ll die if I don’t. I lean forward.
The woman screams, “What the hell are you doing?”
I seal the motorcyclist’s nostrils with my mouth, inhale, and spit a clot of warm blood onto the street.
The man inhales through his nose. Again. Once more. A-B-C. I bow my head and close my eyes. Please don’t let him die. I don’t think I’m supposed to kill anyone.
Two fire trucks arrive, tires squealing. Firefighters leap into the road and unroll a hose.
I get up off my knees and yell, “This man is hurt!”
A firefighter runs over and shouts, “You're bleeding from the mouth!”
“It's not my blood!” I point down.
He casts an assessing glance over both of us and says, “The ambulance will be here any second."
At that instant, the motorcycle explodes with a roar. Brilliant yellow flames leap a dozen feet into the air; I smell sulfur and rubber. Fire blackens the edges of my car’s white body.
An ambulance and two police cars pull up, sirens screaming. Now that help has arrived, I feel lost inside my body: I can't remember how to make my hands cover my ears.
Two E.M.T.’s run over carrying medical kits.
“Where are you hurt?” asks one.
“I'm not! It's him,” I say.
“You're bleeding from the mouth!”
“It's not my blood!” I point down.
One E.M.T. kneels down and puts his ear to the motorcyclist's mouth. With silken movements he slides his hand under the man’s neck. As the other technician writes on a pad, he says, “Airway is partially obstructed, but somehow he’s breathing. Neck is not broken. Can’t have been down more than eight minutes. Let’s see what we can do.”
* * *
I check out okay at the emergency room, but I ache all over. While giving my statement at the police station, I see witnesses from the apartment balcony, including the woman who told me not to move the motorcyclist's head. I'm afraid to state that I started the man breathing again, so I don’t. I have nightmares all night.
The next day, friends visit me bringing food, their knitting projects, parts from plays they’re rehearsing, money they owe me. I’m stunned by their affection for someone who might have killed or crippled a person. I sleep soundly that night, but for years I’ll be spooked by the gurgling of bathtub drains.
That week, I drive a rented car to my library job at the university. I keep the radio off and the windows open. A colleague takes me to sign off on the remains of my car, and I weep my farewell in the yard full of wrecks.
Everyone except my rabbi says I shouldn’t contact the hospital where the motorcyclist was taken: they tell me it’s an admission of guilt to show I’m worried. My rabbi, who was at fault in a fatal accident some years earlier, drives us to the spot where the accident happened, and we look at it together in silence. He is the only person who suggests I get tested for HIV in six months.
A car-finder service locates a new car for me almost like my old one. I cry when it’s delivered, but I make myself drive it immediately. Although it smells like my old car, the power steering robs it of personality.
That same week, fifteen days after the collision, the motorcyclist calls me at work, getting past the army of staffers screening my calls from reporters and hostile insurance agents. The man introduces himself, tells me he was in a coma until yesterday, and asks how I am.
I say it doesn’t matter; how is he? My heart knocks in my throat.
The man says he has a steel plate in his skull and a steel rod in his back. He complains that he’ll have trouble getting through airport security for the rest of his life, then asks whether I know what happened to his expensive leather boots.
I say I don’t.
He asks whether there is truth to the rumors that I am a lawyer or that I own a condo.
I say there isn’t.
He asks isn’t it ridiculous that the police say he was doing sixty-seven in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone?
I don’t say anything.
I think of asking whether he has ever had unprotected sex, a blood transfusion, or an I.V. drug habit, but I don’t know how. I stare out my office window. When we hang up a few minutes later, I’m not frightened for him anymore. I’m frightened for me.
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dblicher has refreshed her CPR training. She has never tested HIV-positive.