Authors: Unknown
“No, no, no, the kid’s great, the kid’s fine. The only thing is they were riding without helmets, and it’s a serious safety violation.”
And she’s going, “Oh my God, oh Jesus!”
“OK, don’t worry about it, all right? Have a good night,” and he hangs up, and they bring Cleveland and Noah together again, and they give them this half-ass lecture on bicycle safety.
The cop says, “I’m supposed to write you up. But I’m going to give you a pass this time.” And Cleveland’s still kind of smiling, but the smile doesn’t go past here, you know, it never reaches his eyes. And he gets back on the bike, and the kid gets on the handlebars, and the kid’s going through that post-crying jag, you know, shudder withdrawal, and Cleveland’s kind of talking him down as he pushes off, and they disappear up Essex.
We get back in the police car, and I’m sitting in the back, and I’m not saying a fucking thing. And we go in dead silence
for about two blocks, and one cop finally says to the other, “You know something, big guy?”
And the other guy says, “What’s that, big guy?”
He says, “It still feels fishy to me.”
And the other cop says, “Hey, we gave it a shot, man. That’s all we can do.”
Richard Price,
who was born in the Bronx in 1949, is the author of seven novels. His first,
The Wanderers
(1974), which he wrote while enrolled as a graduate writing student at Columbia University, and his second,
Blood brothers
(1976), both became the basis of feature films. Following the publication of his fourth novel,
The Breaks
(1983), Price began writing for film, and his screenplay for
The Color of Money
(1986) was nominated for an Oscar. Price has continued to write for television and film, adapting three of his own recent novels,
Clockers
(1992),
Freedomland
(1998), and
Samaritan
(2003). He won an Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series
The Wire
in 2007, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2009. His most recent book,
Lush Life,
was published in 2008.
JON LEVIN
W
hen I was young, I was a bright, happy, enthusiastic kid. So some people may have been a little surprised when years later I had become an angry, sullen, disaffected high school dropout.
It was perfectly logical to me. But life as a high school dropout quickly proved even more depressing than life as a high school student. So I tested my way into Boston University. But then dropped outta that.
If I could’ve signed a form to officially drop out of American society or the human race, that would’ve been next. So believe me when I tell you that when I was twenty-one in 1990, and I applied for a job working the night shift in the OR at Massachusetts General Hospital, it was not out of a great desire to help my fellow man. I was only doing it because the job paid really well—$9 an hour, which was $3 an hour more than the job I had been doing, working in a supermarket pushing carts of meat around.
The fact that the hospital hired me at that time in my life should be sufficient to scare all of you into taking excellent care of yourselves from now on. But hire me they did, and my actual
job title was OR nursing assistant, night shift. I was basically an orderly with a few additional responsibilities.
The most fundamental part of the job was transporting patients to surgery, which I was trained to do during the day shift for two weeks, when everything is regularly scheduled; the patients are all in stable condition, usually awake but mildly sedated, and it’s pretty simple.
On the night shift nothing is scheduled of course—it’s the middle of the night. Patients are usually kinda bloody. Sometimes they’re highly agitated and need to be restrained. But for the most part they were either heavily sedated or completely unconscious—there wasn’t much interaction with me—so transporting them to surgery felt eerily reminiscent of my previous job: pushing carts of meat around.
I didn’t see them as human beings at a time of great need so much as packages that needed to be delivered to a specific room as efficiently as possible.
You know: “Burst appendix to OR 22,” “Coked up scumbag with multiple stab wounds to OR 27,” “Pregnant woman hit by a drunk driver to OR 24,” “Guy who shot his face off to OR 33.” All manner of human suffering, but to me, it was all the same.
Every once in a while there would be a patient who’d be awake and wanting to chat. And in those circumstances, I was encouraged to talk in a soothing manner as I wheeled them through the halls, because it’s been clinically proven that a freaked-out patient won’t do as well under the knife.
Like this one guy, Alexander. He was a high school teacher who’d fallen a great distance in a rock climbing accident and injured his spine. He was afraid that he was gonna be paralyzed, and would he be able to teach? And what would his students do? He was really worried about his students.
And so I said to him, “Well, look, anyone who’s only concerned about his students at a time like this is probably so dedicated to teaching that nothing will stand in his way.” And then, for effect, I added, “I only wish I’d had a teacher like you when I was in school. Maybe I would’ve graduated.”
Okay, I admit I was laying it on a little thick. But he seemed to genuinely appreciate that.
And, all right, he was sedated, but he responded by saying, “Well, you really helped me, so I’m gonna help you. I want you to promise me that you’re gonna go back to school and finish your education.”
I immediately thought,
Well, that’s not gonna happen.
But, you know, what was I gonna say to this man—
no
?
So I tried not to roll my eyes as I made him this “promise.” I got him to surgery, and I never saw him again, ’cause, you know, you deliver a package, and you don’t stand around waiting to see what the guy does with the box. It was not my job to care or to follow up.
So maybe three months later, it’s like three in the morning, and there’s a call from the ICU. They have a patient named Mr. Williams who had had surgery the previous day and apparently had sprung a little leak and needed to come back down. So I go up to get him, and the nurses are disconnecting him from his respirator and his EKG and attaching a portable heart monitor to the rolling ICU bed and an air bag to his breathing tube, which I’m going to have to squeeze to breathe for him during the trip. This means that someone’s gonna have to come with me, because you can’t really steer an ICU bed and squeeze an air bag at the same time.
Unfortunately the nurses in the ICU were already overtaxed and couldn’t spare anyone except for a young woman
named Melissa, who I believe was a nursing student. She was very nervous because she’d never been anywhere else in the hospital before and had never really been given much responsibility.
But the nurses assured us that, despite appearances, Mr. Williams was pretty much okay and this would be totally routine.
I told Melissa, “Yeah I’ve done this dozens of times. It’ll be a piece of cake.”
So I’m pushing from the back and squeezing the air bag with my free hand, and I have Melissa steering from the front as I direct her on the shortest route to the OR. The entire trip would only take a few minutes, most of which would be spent waiting for an old, crappy elevator. So we’re waiting for this elevator, and I briefly consider maybe going out of our way to another building connected by a ramp where there’s a faster, more modern elevator, but I figure it’s actually pretty far, and by the time we get there, the time savings will be nullified.
The elevator arrives. We get in. The doors close. I push the button. And nothing happens.
And then the lights go out.
And I’m about to say,
What the fuck?
when we start to move.
But it’s not right, and we’re moving too fast, and the elevator’s not making its normal sound.
And my stomach is in my throat, and we’re
falling
, and WE’RE FALLING!
And if I had had time for a thought process, it probably would’ve been like,
What the fuck? I’m not ready to die. I didn’t sign up for this.
And then I would’ve shit myself.
But before any of that can take place, the elevator’s emergency brake kicks in and slams us to a stop so violently that I’m
thrown to my knees, and Melissa is thrown to the floor, and Mr. Williams is bouncing in his bed, his equipment jostling around.
So now we’re stopped somewhere, in this tiny, dark box, and there’s three sounds I can hear: the elevator’s emergency signal buzzing, Melissa screaming, and Mr. Williams’s heart monitor indicating that, like our elevator, his heart has stopped.
So I get to my feet, and for a brief moment I think,
No, no, no, no, NO!
But denial and anger quickly give way to, in this case, bargaining:
Well, Melissa’s got some actual medical education, so she should be in charge.
But then reality sets in, and it was like:
Okay, Melissa’s in a bad way right now. She’s cowering in the corner, wondering if we’re still all gonna die. But if we don’t do something right away, ONE of us is DEFINITELY gonna die.
So I then hit acceptance and begrudgingly admitted to myself that I had to get in the game here.
Fortunately, in a sense, our situation didn’t really leave us with many options. And also fortunately the hospital had trained me to do CPR when they hired me. So I had Melissa stand up, and by the dim lights of the LEDs on the heart monitor, I could sorta see her hand.
I grabbed it and put it on the air bag, and I said, “Okay, you do the air bagging. I’m going to do chest compressions.”
I moved around to the side, but Mr. Williams was a big guy, and I couldn’t get good leverage, and unfortunately it was too dark to see the controls of the ICU bed underneath it to lower it. So in desperation I did something I had seen one of the emergency ward doctors do one time. I went to the foot of the bed and climbed up onto it, sort of mounting Mr. Williams, and,
kneeling over him, did chest compressions from above. And it seemed to work okay as far as I could tell.
I have no idea how long we were like that in the dark, but it felt like hours, until the lights flickered and came back on, and the buzzing emergency thing stopped. And then a garbled voice came over the intercom saying, “Stand by.”
And I was like, “Fuck you!”
But then we were moving again, only this time in a controlled manner, until we finally arrived at the third-floor OR and the doors opened. And Melissa was so overjoyed and eager to get us out of there that she started pushing us forward.
And that’s when something
bad
happened.
The wheels on the front of the ICU bed swiveled around ninety degrees, right as they were situated over the gap between the elevator and the floor, and slid down into the gap like slices of bread going into a toaster.
I was nearly thrown off of the bed by our sudden change in momentum and had to grab on to the side rails just to stay in place. And then, of course, the elevator doors started slamming on us over and over again. Melissa stopped air bagging and ran to the front and was battling the elevator doors as she tried to lift us out of the gap. Of course it was no use, so she stopped and went back to air bagging. And I was still doing chest compressions, now slightly more difficult due to the incline.
I made eye contact with her, and without actually exchanging words, we both just started screaming for help. It was kind of a busy moment in the OR right then, and no one responded for a while. Finally someone showed up, a wonderful older gentleman named Mr. Selwin, who was one of the night cleaning crew guys.
He comes running in, and in his thick island accent says,
“What’s all the commotion?” And then he sees us, and he’s like, “Oh my God!” And he tries to pull us free, but it doesn’t work, even though he’s a strong guy.
So he’s like, “Okay, you just keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll go get more help.” And he runs out.
Within a few moments, he comes back with “reinforcements” in the person of Mr. Guppy, the surgical instrument technician. The two of them are now trying to lift us free, and they’re struggling and struggling. And finally, with a horrible metal scraping sound, they wrench us free.
And now we’re off!
And suddenly all the panic and confusion recede, and we are in motion.
They say, “Okay, where you going?”
“OR 29.”
“Fine, okay.”
And then the double doors just open, and we’re whipping around the corners and everything’s very effortless, and we’re flying now—Melissa is running trying to keep up while still doing the air bagging.
And of course, I’m still on top of Mr. Williams, still pumping away at his chest, and there’s a breeze in my face from our newfound velocity. And I have to say, it was absolutely exhilarating—to the point where I had to actively stifle the urge to laugh out loud.
So I screw my face up into a mask of seriousness because it would be a tad unseemly to appear to be enjoying riding a patient down the hall. And we get to OR 29, and the entire surgical team is there, of course, waiting for us like,
Where the hell have you been?
But as soon as they see us, they know the situation is not normal.
They fly into action and seamlessly take over for everybody, and I can now hop off because, obviously, Mr. Williams is in far more capable hands. So I grab the paperwork that was at the foot of the bed that I had to process for him, and they get to work on him.
They save him, and he lives.
And in this case, for the first time ever, I did follow up, and I found out that not only did he live through the night, but he recovered and left the hospital.
I processed the paperwork and found Melissa in the hall, and we breathed this collective sigh of relief. Then I escorted her back up to the ICU, taking a different route so that she wouldn’t have to take the bad elevators. She gave me a hug, and I never saw her again.
I came back down to the OR, and there was my boss behind the main desk, and he said, “Hey Jon, I heard what you did. Nice job.”