Ennui and emergencies

I had started a post last Friday to let everyone know that I was settling into work to the point where everything felt like a routine. It was so calm at some points that one could even have said that a few of my days were boring. I actually looked up the word “ennui” one day, just to see how aptly it fit the string of quiet days.

But before I had finished a paragraph of that post on Friday, the day became a piping hot bowl of insanity. Before my morning coffee was even cooled down enough to sip without burning my tongue, security radioed that we had a situation in the back parking lot. I went outside with the social services and management teams to have a look. A guard had found a girl, perhaps twenty years old, unconscious and slumped over in the driver’s seat of a car that was still running. There was a hypodermic needle in her hand.

I won’t lie—I thought she was dead. Her skin was so pale it was gray, and her lips and hands were turning purple. Before I noticed that her chest was rising and falling slightly, my first thought was shock at how calmly I was processing my first dead body. At least, one that wasn’t already inside a coffin.

One of the hardest parts of this job for me is that we cannot, legally, touch a person who needs medical attention. (For example, if a frail tenant falls down, I can’t help her up. I have to wait with her until a guard or EMT comes around.) So we stood and watched, unable to help the girl, until EMS arrived. Those guys are really good at what they do—before her coworkers pulled up in an ambulance, the first EMT who arrived stuck something up the girl’s nose, pulled it out through her mouth, and the girl finally stirred and woke up. She was stoned out of her mind, but at least able to walk to the ambulance that drove her away.

The day went back to normal, and that familiar, sometimes suffocating ennui began to creep in again until I was handed a big pile of paperwork. (I’m told it’s practice for the winter months, when I will have a LOT of paperwork to do, pretty much all day long, to help the tenants with energy bills.)

The day plodded along, with Pandora and the occasional office gossip to keep me from going crazy from boredom. But around four o’clock, the second wave of madness hit. We got a call that a tenant was having trouble breathing, and an ambulance was en route. That’s nothing out of the ordinary around here, so when the plant manager radioed for a social services escort to the tenant’s room I just grabbed the file and ran upstairs (the rest of the SS team was handling another situation.)

But when we got there, the routine call seemed a lot less routine. The tenant in question has asthma, so I think I just expected to witness an asthma attack. It turned out she was in anaphylactic shock—she had a food allergy that none of us knew about. (Which made me feel dumb; I was flipping through her file specifically to find out if she had any allergies. The line read, “Allergies: None.” Go figure.) She was refusing her oxygen mask and gasping out the words me muero (Spanish for I’m dying) over and over again. Right after EMS walked in, she stopped breathing, fell unconscious, and flopped backward onto her bed. For the second time in one day, I thought the poor woman was dead.

This resuscitation was a lot more violent than the one I’d witnessed in the morning. The paramedics shoved a tube up her nose because her throat was clenched and our guards had to hold her down on her bed when she began to fight (tubes in your nose really hurt, and she was really out of it for lack of oxygen anyway). They had to move her to a gurney using the comforter on her bed, and I was terrified that they would drop her. She was still gasping and flailing around when they took her away.

The most interesting realization for me as I witnessed both of these events (and that’s about all I do during them: I witness. I'm professional moral support) was that, while I could certainly feel my body reacting to the situation—tense shoulders, a furrowed brow, and an eventual headache—I did not get emotional or upset. I think that’s part of learning to do the emergency part of this job. But it certainly is different from the way I thought I’d handle emergencies. As recently as senior year of college, high-stress situations made me cry. The difference now is that even after everything was resolved, I don’t get upset. I went home, lifted weights until my arms shook, did yoga, and the workout made me sleep for thirteen hours the following night. But I never became emotional. I think it would be too exhausting.