Sometimes you think you’re asking the right questions and all you get in answer is nonsense.\u00a0 The problem with my job is that it happens when you’re dealing with emergency situations.<\/p>\n
There are tons of protocols, from determining trauma to dropping off the already dead, and even if they’re set in policy and procedure manuals there’s still an etiquette.\u00a0 I mean, it’s not codified anywhere, but for some of us it’s the need to live life blatantly and fully because we don’t care about leaving that pretty “nothing much happened” corpse, and for some of us it’s because, “Please,” and “Thank you,” make a heck of a lot of difference when for anything less than that you see the worst.<\/p>\n
This job deals with extremes.\u00a0 You get the superstitious types (just about anyone who continues to claim the full moon brings out the loonies is one of ’em) and you get the disbelievers.\u00a0 (I won’t call them skeptics – “skeptic” implies someone who, if you could show them some proof, would change their minds.)\u00a0\u00a0 Every once in a while you get someone who slides from one side of the scale to another.<\/p>\n
And you get a whole heck of a lot of witches.<\/p>\n
It makes sense, I guess.\u00a0 It’s a helping profession, and a lot of them feel they need the karmic boost.\u00a0 Alright, that’s my cynical side.\u00a0 It’s a way to take their healing qualities and put them to good use.\u00a0\u00a0 We don’t talk about it.\u00a0 We’re not casting hexes on the boys who run off after finding out that pulling the trigger is nothing like it was in the video game or on television.\u00a0 We’re not slathering herbs and chanting over someone who is bleeding out on the sidewalk.\u00a0 Medicine and healing may not be the same thing, but there is definitely a code.<\/p>\n
Do I have a healing altar where some of the patients I transport have a place?\u00a0 Heck yeah! Do I tell them?\u00a0 Best thing is that I can say I am praying for them.\u00a0 That’s a fairly socially acceptable phrase and still true.<\/p>\n
But this is about a fellow I’ve met twice in the last month.\u00a0 A fellow named “E.”<\/p>\n
This is about a couple of run reports I couldn’t be honest about, because “lacerations from Dragon” (or any kind of beast in the midst of a city that isn’t a dog or illicit big cat) just doesn’t help the hospital.\u00a0 Snakebite?\u00a0 Sure.\u00a0 Sharkbite? Yep.\u00a0 Scorpion, dog, spider, any of these things and there’d be a protocol.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “Poisonous festering wounds from mythical creature” just doesn’t have a place in modern medicine.<\/p>\n
And the couple of hundred thorns poking out like quills from a plant I couldn’t identify?\u00a0 That didn’t help, either.\u00a0\u00a0 Pertinent history?\u00a0 “Had wandered off into another dimension.”\u00a0 Again, not something one wants their supervisor to review, and not something your local emergency room is likely to be able to handle.<\/p>\n
I’ve heard weird things, and usually you just have to ignore them.\u00a0 Man who appears to have two hearts, at least according to your stethoscope?\u00a0 Smiling lady on whom you simply can’t find a pulse?\u00a0 Both of those were just last week.\u00a0 “We don’t deny emergency services to the undead,” I said to my partner as I shut the doors, just like it was a company motto.<\/p>\n
After all, the only type of person we ever say is missing their brain is usually a supervisor.\u00a0 I don’t know what it is that takes someone from field to desk besides a thinking-ectomy, because it isn’t like they haven’t had to put up with the same things we do.\u00a0 The smells.\u00a0 The SUVs that think they can climb up on the sidewalks or emergency access lanes because they could afford the downpayment on their inexcusable vehicles.<\/p>\n
Not that I have an opinion.\u00a0 I try not to have opinions on the job.\u00a0 I just try to save lives, and an opinion there makes you a devil.\u00a0 Well, at least a demon.\u00a0 Anytime you get to choose a life or death, you become something inhuman.\u00a0 So my job is to save them all, like I was some Pokemon trainer looking for a record.<\/p>\n
(“I choose you, man face-down in street!”\u00a0 Only then we can’t have them fighting battles.\u00a0 Maybe the Pokemon reference doesn’t work.)<\/p>\n
He was cute, this “E” guy.\u00a0 Kind of dorky in that probably-doesn’t-talk-to-girls-a-lot fashion, but there’s only one cure for that!\u00a0 (Talk to girls, duh.)\u00a0 Dazed and confused, but who isn’t after a major car accident?\u00a0\u00a0 A hit-and-run, at any rate.\u00a0 Maggie, who doesn’t run the coven but has enough ego for it, said it was something else.<\/p>\n
Yeah, she said it was a Dragon.<\/p>\n
It’s funny.\u00a0 I never thought I’d be the skeptic, but that was a big, big idea to swallow down, and I just couldn’t bite into it, you know?\u00a0 I mean, not that I’d know a fewmet from any other kind of turd.\u00a0 Again, my assistance rotation didn’t take the idea into account, and that might have to be done at a veterinary school, anyway.<\/p>\n
When I ran into him the second time, along the same stretch of road, I knew it wasn’t just, well, fate.\u00a0 It was Fate with the capital “F” for me to meet the guy named a capital “E.”\u00a0 Something crazy like that.\u00a0 He had…well, he looked like he’d been through an explosion, which, given that the building was burning (it had been some kind of ethnic restaurant – you know, the kind that was probably pretty good because the people of that ethnicity ate there, but you always felt kind of uncomfortable going into because, well, everyone might like food but you don’t know how to pronounce the stuff on the menu and you don’t feel like you belong) was possible.\u00a0 It didn’t explain the cuts.\u00a0 It didn’t explain the thorns – we thought maybe like splinters for a while, but there wasn’t any obvious cause.\u00a0 I gave an instant to think about the poor nurse who was going to have to start pulling them out.\u00a0\u00a0 No one ruled out internal bleeding or any number of other curiousities, but I had a feeling that just like that car accident (Dragon accident, whatever) he was going to pull through fine.<\/p>\n
I knew to call Maggie.\u00a0 That much I could do.\u00a0 And, well, I’ll make sure to give him my number if I’m right.\u00a0 Fate, I tell you.\u00a0 I just have a feeling about this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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