Paramedic didn’t have a way to “file” this
It was a snow day in Alabama— the kind where they cancel school (and most jobs), the kind where people flood the grocery stores and buy all the milk & bread, the kind where it barely snows…
We went on an emergency call:
- 15 year old female
- Cuts on her hands
- Conscious and alert
That was it.
I thought— from the description— that someone had an accident. Reality turned out to be far from that, however.
We arrived at the house, which happened to be the girl’s neighbor. She ran there when her hands were cut.
She was sitting on the front porch, covered in a thick blanket. This made sense, because it was cold— frigid enough for the weatherman to think it would snow and that the schools needed to close for the day.
I noticed the blanket had blood soaking through it…
“That’s too much for a kitchen accident or something like that,” I thought.
We helped her remove the blanket so we could tend to her wounds. I noticed that she had a few fingers dangling by the skin, she had defense wounds (lacerations) on her forearms, and she had deep cuts on the back of her head where she had been bludgeoned while trying to run away.
I heard the sound of police officers kicking in the front door of the house next door to us…
“That’s my house,” the girl said. “My momma attacked me with a machete.”
With school closed for the day, she decided to walk to the nearby store with her friends to get something to eat. She didn’t want to wake her mom (who was able to sleep in because her place of employment closed for the “snow day”), so she took $5 from her mother’s purse to get something to eat. She told us she planned to pay it back.
She said that she tried to explain that to her mom.
“I didn’t want to wake her up. She was asleep. I just thought…”
This call marked me, because I wasn’t sure how to sort it in my head. None of it made sense. I couldn’t believe that people actually treated others— much less their family members— this way.
The teenage girl was an artist. I wondered how the attack and her injuries might impact her future plans…
On the way home, I pulled over— off the road. I stopped and cried. Again, I had no mental grid to understand any of what I encountered.
Since I knew the girl’s name, I tracked her down on Instagram a few weeks later. I needed to know how she was— if she was able to get surgery to keep her fingers, if she was able to continue her art, and if she was able to find a safe place to live (I feared she might be thrown into foster care or “the system” after that).
She replied quickly.
- She was fine.
- Doctors saved her fingers somehow.
- She was able to continue creating her art…
But she lost her family that day. Everything was different after that. She couldn’t stay with her mom anymore.
I think connecting with her online (though it might be against official protocol) was part of the healing process for me. I mean, it sounds strange that I would need to heal from that, but it really helped to make that personal connection after the event.
I needed to hear “her voice,” even if it was just through a few DMs on social media.
You can’t resolve some of this stuff on your own. Yet, to move forward, you must find a way to handle it.
