When your best isn't enough

It’s been a while since I posted anything—probably because of my birthday, a JV retreat, and getting my usual early autumn cold/cough/upper respiratory tract infection. Where in the world did I last leave off?

I’ll blog about my birthday and the retreat in a separate post. I needed to tell this story, if only to demonstrate that horrible things like this happen, even in a country a developed as the US.

There was an incident at work over a week ago now that put life in Camden into rather harsh perspective. Someone impaled his leg on the fence around our property, and it fell to our security staff and the social services office to help him until EMS got there. I was going to write a post about it the following day, because I thought it illustrated how absurd and random life around here can be in an episodic, but harmless manner. But before I finished writing the post, one of the guards came and told me that the man we had helped had died in the hospital.

This is what I wrote before I found out what happened to him at the hospital:

Mental image of the day: as I was leaving work yesterday I got a radio call that someone had “hurt himself on the fence around the building.” The fence is iron, and the points of it come up to about my eye-level in little spikes that look like arrows. I couldn’t imagine how someone would get hurt on it, unless he tried to jump over and fell on the spikes. Sure enough…

The guy was running full speed, jumped up on a fire hydrant in one stride and tried to launch himself over the fence (which, if he had made it all the way over, would have been damn impressive). But he didn’t make it, so he impaled his leg on a spike of the fence and hung there by the hole in his calf. Some of the tenants lifted him down while one of them ran for help. By the time I got there, he was on the ground. The only reason *I* didn’t faint at the sight of it was that I was trying to keep *him* from fainting at the sight of it. Which seemed to work, until the paramedics got there and made him stand up and try to walk. The poor guy went out like a light.

If you can’t tell, I thought he was going to be fine. Injured, yes, but ultimately fine. The guards and I did our best—holding his head in my lap, trying to keep him conscious, elevating the leg, getting him to talk, etc—and he seemed OK. Looking back, there were little things—his lips were turning white, his stomach kept twitching (he wasn’t wearing a shirt), and he told me he was dizzy. I tried to coach him to breathe so that he wouldn’t faint, which was really all that kept me from retching at the sight of the wound.

The next day, the guard who had been on point during the situation came in and told me and Maria, the other case manager who had been there, that he had died in the hospital. The man was strung out on cocaine. When a person has cocaine in their system, the shock of a paper cut would be enough to make your heart stop. An iron rod through his leg can certainly do it, too.

It made me much more upset than I thought it would. To begin with, it’s always a shock when someone you tried to help doesn’t make it, especially when the injury didn’t appear to be life-threatening. Secondly, the way the paramedics treated him was appalling. I was shocked at the time at how callous they were at the time; I was furious about it when I found out he had died. These were the final few hours of the man’s life, and the people who were supposed to care for him treated him like dirt. My only (limited) consolation was that some people, like the tenants who got him off of the fence, the security guards, and our staff treated him with the dignity he deserved at the moment, which turned out to be one of his last.

Anyway, I was pretty upset about the whole situation. It was my turn to cook dinner that night, and my lovely roomies took over for me because I kept crying into the tomato soup. They finished up and let me go to my room to cry, calm down, and pray. The whole thing made me so sad. Who prays for people like that when they die? Did they find any family to bury him? Was there a priest or chaplain on hand in case he needed or wanted to talk?

I called my family and a few friends to try and order my thoughts and feelings before writing this down for the blogging world. Pray for Camden, if you need an extra intention. It’s a broken, sad place a lot of the time.