Archive for March 17th, 2009
Appearances Can Be Deceiving
“It was a drug deal gone bad.”
I assumed I was in Sarasota Memorial Hospital. I was listening to two nurses talking about me.
When you lose more than 50% of the blood in your body, everything shuts down. To keep me alive, they had a ventilator forcing air into my lungs. My heart must have been beating. I don’t know whether it was assisted or not. I tried to open my eyes, but I couldn’t. At that point, the only thing I could do was listen.
I felt my bowels let loose underneath me.
“Oh, gross! He shit himself.”
I could understand their disgust. I’m a big boy, and they would have to clean me up. But I had been shot in the belly. Wouldn’t there be an expectation? Wouldn’t a bowel movement be a sign of something – either positive or negative?
I still don’t know how those hospital employees came to the conclusion that I was shot during a drug deal. That’s not what happened. The police report details what did occur.
When I answered the door that night, I was wearing pants and a shirt, socks and sneakers. I had no ID on me. It’s my habit to empty my pockets when I come home, and put the contents in the same spot on the kitchen counter.
I suppose it’s human nature to assume the worst. Especially when you work the night shift in an Emergency Room.
I found out later that I had been air lifted by helicopter to the Saint Petersburg Bayfront Trauma Center. I don’t know if Sarasota Memorial refused me because I didn’t have a health insurance card, or if the decision was made to move me because Bayfront had trauma surgeons at the ready.
After spending two hours with the Sarasota police at the station house, my girlfriend drove up to Bayfront with my insurance card. When she arrived around 1 a.m., she gave the card to the emergency room receptionist. I was in surgery. The people working on me had no reason to believe I had insurance to cover the cost of the surgery. All they saw was a naked man (the EMTs had cut away my clothes) covered in blood.
My femoral artery had been severed. That’s a 10 to 15 minute bleed out. The Sarasota police were on the scene immediately. An unseen eye witness watched the whole incident and dialed 911 as soon as I dropped to the ground.
