It's going to take me a while to catch up on all the threads, because my life has been absolute madness lately... and yesterday it just escalated into a
crescendo of horror and heroism that I have to share somehow. I'm completely exhausted so this will be the reader's digest version, but.... Just....
wow. The little tale I'm about to type is pretty gory, so if that is going to bother anyone, er... I'm sorry, please don't read. Like I said, I
need to tell this somewhere.
Yesterday I took the Greyhound bus halfway across the state to meet my best friend. He's been having hallucinations and impulsive suicide attempts recently, and I was going to be with him when he checked himself into a mental hospital. He felt like a potential danger to himself and others, what with reality getting so wonky all of a sudden, but didn't want to be alone and didn't really know what to do. So I called a few weeks off work and went down to meet my cousin, who was going to help with transportation and be friendly and the like, even given that he didn't know my friend.
Except when we get to my friend's house, it looks like the set of every horror movie I've ever seen. There is blood everywhere, soaked into everything, the lights are out, and it reeks nauseatingly of blood and raw flesh.
Sprinting through the house looking for him, we find him standing in the very back room, in semi-darkness, swaying and woozy from blood loss, and COMPLETELY covered in blood. Once he was fully conscious, we jokingly called him 'alienface' because the thick layer of black clotting blood completely obscured his features. There were knives on the floor, and he looked like a chunk of well-tenderized meat. The icing on the cake was the large coffee mug he was holding under his arms, overflowing with his blood and still filling more. I think, at this point, I'm mixing my tenses and I apologize for it.
My cousin was the one who snapped us out of "D:" mode long enough for us to do all the boy scout first aid stuff that you never think you're really going to be using; and once we finally convinced him(and it was hard) to give up the mug, we frogmarched him out of the apartment, past a few horrified neighbors, and into the car to go to the hospital. It was the first time in my life I've been able to skip ahead over every mildly sick person in the ER waiting room and go right into the back.
There was one time where I almost lost it - otherwise I think I did remarkably well. When they were cleaning the gaping, purple, oozing wounds, I started to get tunnel vision. I've worked in a hospital. I'm almost always okay with wounds and bodily fluids. But the little chunks of meat being scraped out of the cuts, and the terrible squelching sound - along with the knowledge that it was my best friend - got me throwing up in my mouth and beginning to black out. The nurse actually worried about me enough to grab me and put me in a sturdy chair, but I didn't let him make me lie down like he wanted me to. I insisted that, if I were to lay down, I wouldn't be able to hold my friend's hand. This, coincidentally, was the same nurse who later said "Now I don't know what's going on in your life, kid, but you obviously have someone here who loves you very much. And that's a lot more than most people can say."
By the end of the night(and after going through three dressings because the blood had soaked through), he was talking and laughing and was as near to being himself as he's come lately. He smiled and hugged both myself and my cousin - because you can't help but become friends with a guy who's waded through puddles of blood to get you to a hospital - as they loaded him into the ambulance 12 long hours later to check him in to one of the state's best psychiatric hospitals. He's there getting a treatment plan worked out, and I'm back at my cousin's little apartment and trying to get some rest and pull myself completely back together.
I feel very good, other than the fact that I can't quite get the stench of blood out of my nose.
Yesterday I took the Greyhound bus halfway across the state to meet my best friend. He's been having hallucinations and impulsive suicide attempts recently, and I was going to be with him when he checked himself into a mental hospital. He felt like a potential danger to himself and others, what with reality getting so wonky all of a sudden, but didn't want to be alone and didn't really know what to do. So I called a few weeks off work and went down to meet my cousin, who was going to help with transportation and be friendly and the like, even given that he didn't know my friend.
Except when we get to my friend's house, it looks like the set of every horror movie I've ever seen. There is blood everywhere, soaked into everything, the lights are out, and it reeks nauseatingly of blood and raw flesh.
Sprinting through the house looking for him, we find him standing in the very back room, in semi-darkness, swaying and woozy from blood loss, and COMPLETELY covered in blood. Once he was fully conscious, we jokingly called him 'alienface' because the thick layer of black clotting blood completely obscured his features. There were knives on the floor, and he looked like a chunk of well-tenderized meat. The icing on the cake was the large coffee mug he was holding under his arms, overflowing with his blood and still filling more. I think, at this point, I'm mixing my tenses and I apologize for it.
My cousin was the one who snapped us out of "D:" mode long enough for us to do all the boy scout first aid stuff that you never think you're really going to be using; and once we finally convinced him(and it was hard) to give up the mug, we frogmarched him out of the apartment, past a few horrified neighbors, and into the car to go to the hospital. It was the first time in my life I've been able to skip ahead over every mildly sick person in the ER waiting room and go right into the back.
There was one time where I almost lost it - otherwise I think I did remarkably well. When they were cleaning the gaping, purple, oozing wounds, I started to get tunnel vision. I've worked in a hospital. I'm almost always okay with wounds and bodily fluids. But the little chunks of meat being scraped out of the cuts, and the terrible squelching sound - along with the knowledge that it was my best friend - got me throwing up in my mouth and beginning to black out. The nurse actually worried about me enough to grab me and put me in a sturdy chair, but I didn't let him make me lie down like he wanted me to. I insisted that, if I were to lay down, I wouldn't be able to hold my friend's hand. This, coincidentally, was the same nurse who later said "Now I don't know what's going on in your life, kid, but you obviously have someone here who loves you very much. And that's a lot more than most people can say."
By the end of the night(and after going through three dressings because the blood had soaked through), he was talking and laughing and was as near to being himself as he's come lately. He smiled and hugged both myself and my cousin - because you can't help but become friends with a guy who's waded through puddles of blood to get you to a hospital - as they loaded him into the ambulance 12 long hours later to check him in to one of the state's best psychiatric hospitals. He's there getting a treatment plan worked out, and I'm back at my cousin's little apartment and trying to get some rest and pull myself completely back together.
I feel very good, other than the fact that I can't quite get the stench of blood out of my nose.
