The Happy Family

The woman was on a bed, unconscious, foaming at the mouth.

I shook my head, trying to get it on straight.

"Umm, what's going on?" I asked.

The woman's daughter was scrambling around the apartment, desperately searching for her mother's medications. She's a diabetic, she said.

Then the arguing started.

A man in his twenties walked into the room. He was shirtless. From his ribcage hung an abundance of fat, collected in large rolls, some marked by strange bruises, as though he couldn't turn a corner without one of the rolls swinging up into the air and striking a table, a chair, or a payphone. And his breasts, oh his breasts, they sagged down almost to the bottom of his ribs, each terminating in a dark, round pancake of a nipple. It was hard to imagine him with his shirt on, hair in cornrows, strutting down the street and lookin' tough.

"I don't want to go to no hospital," he moaned, throwing down his arms.

His sister shot back, "I can't believe you're so selfish, Tyrone."

Amidst all this tertiary drama was the woman, now seizing. I rubbed my eyes, both wishing I hadn't drank so much the day before and half-glad the apartment was so poorly lit. My partner started the paperwork as I searched for a vein. I tried the AC. Nothing. I tried the hand. Nothing.

She was on her 3rd seizure when I decided to hit her in the shoulder with Glucagon, or "the sugar stuff," as my ever-so-brilliant partner referred to it.

Just in case you don't know, Dextrose, a.k.a. "D50", is sugar. Glucagon is a hormone that makes your body release sugar. But that's just a minor detail.

As we prepared to move the woman, another family member showed up. It was her husband. He was trying to buckle his belt using a steak knife. Whatever, I thought, it's New York City. Maybe it's a black thing.

It's not. It's a drunk thing.

Anyway, it was 9am and this woman's husband was totally smashed. I mean, he was so retarded that I figured he must have been on smack or sniffing glue or something. His daughter would yell at him, scream at him, and he would just stand there, yellow beanie falling off, staring ahead, a lost expression on his face

I wondered what it would be like to have such a man as a father.

Bitch Tits declared again that he didn't want to go to the hospital. His father stood there, unmoved, staring down at the knife in his hands. The daughter bustled around, gathering clothes for the trip to the hospital.

She grabbed my hand, pulling it away from her mother's abdomen. "Don't touch her stomach too hard, she's got something there, I can feel it." She touched her mother gently. "It's like it's moving around. If you press on it, you'll make her have a seizure again."

Oh, the innocence.

It's not her stomach that's making her have the seizure, I explained. It's that her blood sugar is too low.

She looked me warily, eyeing my hands.

The woman grew more alert as we flopped her onto the stretcher. At first she was just speaking gibberish, but after a few minutes hen she started babbling on about Medicaid.

Her daughter, poor thing, was taken in by this, and that's what I didn't understand. Clearly, this kind of thing happened all the time, and her daughter still didn't get the drill. Yes. She passes out. She has seizures. We give her something, her blood sugar goes up. At first she babbles. Then she gets agitated. Then—after a long while—she relaxes.

But the daughter was sucked in. She yells at Bitch Tits for being selfish. She yells at her dad for being drunk. I wondered why she let herself get caught up in the drama.

Maybe it was that she cared. I had forgotten what that looked like.

Either way, her disquiet was nothing compared to the voice of her mother.

"I was a police officer for twenty years!" she cried out. "All those people tried to kill me. And now you! You get away from me, so help me god," she glared at the empty eyes of her husband, "You fucking drunk."

In the ambulance, I sat quietly in the corner as the woman berated the man, occasionally glancing over my shoulder to see how close we were to the hospital.

Paperwork—I was doing paperwork—and what they had, their problem, I could not fix.

“I worked in a prison for twenty years!” she cried again, her voice growing more violent. “I’m gonna end up dead because of you, you fucking drunk! You fucking drunk!”

Her eyes smoldered as she stared his face. It was vacant, like a junkie’s. A stream of tears slid down the woman's cheek.

I glanced at the two of them and stepped out of the ambulance.

Ahh, I thought, spring is almost here.

Comments

[Steve]

It's sad, isnt it? I cant imagine how people let themselves get so far down that theyre drunk at 9:00 am, and I cant fathom why or how someone could be so selfish as to complain about taking their mother to the hospital. Sometimes I swear that misanthropy is the answer for the worlds problems.