Subnostr

When I was going to Respiratory Therapy school I took a job at a local hospital as a janitor. This was mainly so I had an in with the organization after I graduated and would go on to work there for 7 years as a RT. But before all that I was a janitor. I mainly worked in the evenings. I liked it for the most part. It was pretty chill, all the riff raff in a hospital is out the door around 5p so I could get my rooms cleaned or whatever I had to do and then watch TV in the clinic wing until it was time to go home.

One evening I was working and I happened to be down by the ER and this dude comes in carrying a bloodied up kid. Apparently there was a farm equipment accident and this kid, he was probably like 5, got run over by a tractor driven by his own father who was now frantically yelling for help while carrying his bloody mess of a kid in his arms. He just picked up the kid and bolted to town because it was quicker than getting an ambulance out to his place and he knew it.

If you have ever been in an ER when it is "go time" you know the type of organized chaos that happened next. Nurses and Drs. running all over the place. It was a small town ER so pretty much everyone who was in house who had any medical training was in the ER. An all hands on deck moment. Except for me the Janitor, I just waited outside of the ER until they were done and I would then have to go in and clean up.

The kid didn't make it. I suspect he was already dead in the arms of his father. The tractor had crushed his skull and there was not much that could be done, though all those involved tried everything and then some. So when it was my time to come in, they had moved the childs body to a room that we could get the temp way down in so his organs could be harvested and donated. I walked in there and saw the gore...and I mean it was total gore. There was blood everywhere and pieces of his skull and gray tissue on the ground by where they were working on him. I assumed at the time that the grey tissue was bits of his brain, but even to this day I am not sure. Still to this day, I am sure of this, that was the mose greusome ER post ressucitative efforts I have ever seen, except for one time when this dude was being chased by the cops and he slit his own neck ear to eat with a razor, didn't kill himself, so I had to intubate him through the giant slit in his neck. The kid with the crushed skull was much worse though because I had a young child and also it was my first time seeing first hand just what kind of fucked up shit I would see.

For a solid minute I just looked at everything and then could feel my hands begin to shake a bit and my stomach churn. But I was going to be in health care and I knew I would have to deal with the visuals of this kind of shit for the rest of my career. So I swallowed it all down. I put it all some place and went about cleaning up the bits of skull and brain and the sticky puddles of blood. I put it all some place. I am not sure where I put it but I know that if I didnt put it some where I would go insane.

Even now I am still not sure where it goes.