Privilege

We were between patients, driving south of 95th on Ashland. I was on the phone with one of my patients, when:

"Bobby, I'm going to have to call you back. There is a person lying in the street."

At first it looked like someone was peering up at the underside of his car. But the angle was wrong and as we got closer we could see that the person (a she, as it turns out) was in front of the car rather than beside it.

My medical assistant looked over. "Do you want me to stop?"

I always have mixed feelings at these moments. People lying on the pavement are not my cup of tea. I'm more of a: "so how have you been doing since I last saw you?" kind of an operator. We parked a short distance up the street and as I walked back I could see that the woman was struggling to stand up. A man was standing beside her and urging her to stay down. The driver was off to the side on her cell phone, presumably phoning 911; hopefully not modeling immediately previous driving behavior. She alternately looked peeved and distraught. The woman on the ground was about fifty with thinning hair, so thin that I found myself looking around for her wig. Her belongings were scattered: purse in the next lane; hat well behind the car. It didn't occur to me that the distance of her belongings from where she landed might indicate how hard she was hit. The woman was rolling around clumsily, like an infant on a mat. With my stethoscope draped over my neck for legitimacy, I walked over and knelt down beside her.

She looked lost. When I asked her if she had hit her head, she didn't know. "I don't know how I got hit by this car."

"You don't remember?" She shook her head.

Despite my urging to remain on her side, she struggled to a sit up. With her fiinally seated, I could see the enormous knot on her temple. Like a grapefruit, I could practically see it growing. Her ear was split open at the lobe. In my mind, I could hear the hard smack as her head collided with the pavement. The swelling gave her face a lob-sided look, like a forceps baby. Unable to resist, I lightly pressed the knot with my index finger, half expecting it to be bony hard. But it was soft and springy, like a rubber ball. She was easily moving her arms and legs. I studied her facial expressions and asked her to follow my finger with her eyes. Everything looked normal.

"I live right over there." she said pointing. My mom is over there."

The driver asked if she wanted her to call her mother. It took the injured woman a couple of tries but she relayed the phone number. I looked at her a bit more closely. She had some sort of ID around her neck. It didn't look like a work ID. Perhaps she was one of those people who wore her identification around her neck the way a child on a field trip has her phone number pinned to her coat. And now here she was, bleeding on the ground. But given the circumstance, with just this glimpse at her during crisis, it was hard to gauge how in the world she usually was. I recall vividly that feeling of unreality after my bike accident. The day was whizzing by as usual and then it had stopped, and I was apart from it. Passersby peered awkwardly into my disjointed dimension. I felt as if I was looking and listening to the world through a long tube.

After a few minutes, the EMTs showed up and I left. Really, other than reassuring the woman I hadn't done anything. I have no trauma training, hence my hesitancy about stepping forward. At most, I'm a hand-holder. But one thing I do have is a calm around people who are hurt or sick. Looking back, I find that this is an example of the tremendous privilege that my job affords me to play this role of caretaker. Though my capacity to alter outcomes is often meager, just being there to hear people's problems, their worries, their hurts, is a tremendous privilege. Most of the time, rushed and fretting about the next patient encounter when the current one has only just started, I miss it. I miss how amazing it is to sit beside someone and be present as they tell me how it is for them.