| we don't know who she is, but when we got to the icu i worked my way through the forest of doctors now pinning her in to get a good long look at her face-- which was hard, it's so swollen now-- but i wanted to make sure it wasn't tina.
do you ever get these fool ideas in your head? do you ever wonder if the person they're talking about is someone you know? i knew tina from the needle exchange. she was very sweet in her loopy way, in and out of jail all the time for crack, i think, but her real job was collecting cans for the recycling center. this was a big hit among my more organized homeless patients-- apparently it pays pretty well.
she used to have a dog, but that was several months and at least one jail sentance ago, and i'm out doing residency now instead of working the needle exchange so i haven't seen her in more than a year. but one of my other patients, one of the ones i drove to the county ER myself because i wouldn't let him out of my sight he was so sick died not all that long ago-- overdose. so it gets you thinking that people you take care of can just die on the streets. but i felt like she was safer with that dog.
and when they started talking about this homeless woman who was out collecting cans until someone beat her until she stopped screaming and left her in the street i just wanted to make sure it wasn't tina.
and it wasn't. you knew that already. so we still don't know who she is and i still don't know what happened to tina. but this is the sort of thing i worry about when i worry about tina. because she's a woman. and she sleeps in a parking lot. and there are people on the street who will beat her to death or very nearly there for that alone, really.
one of my homeless friends told me about hiding, pretending to be asleep while a man was beaten to death a foot or two from her face. i don't think she was fooling anyone, but at least she wasn't next.
the nurse leans over the woman who wasn't tina, trying to keep the lines open, which is difficult as there's a lot of blood in them, coming out of her head, coming out of her throat. we ask if she has any detectable brain function and the nurse says "she withdraws", meaning she can feel pain. i don't know quite how to feel about this.
and i keep thinking about how already her stay in the icu could have housed her for-- what, a year?-- could have housed tina, too. and nobody would have to get beaten and maybe raped. there's a policeman's card on the chart and a flock of doctors and a nurse bending over her and we all showed up after the first system failed, and then the second, and the third, and it went on and on for years until eventually the last thing that was keeping her alive stopped working and the street closed in on her and everything finally went to $hit. |
