Breathe

I do not know your name

Yet I breathed for you

Are you breathing still?

 

You were on the cold ground

On a grey Spring day

A man down in Kenmore Square

 

I was driving to the dealership

On my last week of medical leave

I had gotten a flat.

 

There you were, also flat,

On the ground.

People were standing around.

 

Did I have time?

Was it safe?

I stopped.

 

You needed CPR

But my own surgical stitches

Were too new to be stressed.

 

911 had been called

No one wanted to touch you.

They were worried about harm.

 

A parked truck’s door was open beside you

Had you had fallen out, onto the street?

No one saw it happen.

But you were not breathing

You had no heartbeat

Your heart and brain mattered most.

 

I was frozen by indecision.

I usually receive someone like you

In the controlled hospital setting.

 

What to do?

There was a hotel across the street

Maybe they had an AED?

 

When I came back your shirt was splayed open

A man was kneeling beside you

He’d come from a contractor truck

  

I do not know his name either

But we worked quickly

Together

 

No shock delivered

He did compressions

I gave breaths

 

Why couldn’t I inflate your chest?

I tried the jaw thrust again.

I felt so ineffective.

 

We brought you back after two rounds

Or, rather, we got a heartbeat.

You remained unresponsive.

 

I worried about your non-reactive pupils

Would you live?

What was happening in your brain?

The ambulance came

I gave report

They whisked you away

 

I wondered about you.

What is your story? Who are your loved ones?

Would you be okay?

 

Someone said there had been an inhaler

In the truck with the open door

Maybe you had asthma?

 

I thought of Eric Garner

Instead of rescue breaths

He got asphyxiated

You were a large black man

I am a petite Muslim woman

My partner was a burly white man

During those moments

We were, though,

Just human.
***

I recently submitted the above poem to a writing contest. It describes a real life event I experienced a few months ago.

It gave me a new level of respect for what first responders experience every day. I have always had the luxury of a controlled setting, all the right equipment, a safe environment, trained staff.

It also made me grateful for having the ability -- skills, knowledge, presence of mind -- to act in the moment to help a stranger. I do wish I had done more to urge the bystanders to start CPR while I got the AED (defibrillator) from the hotel across the street, but everyone was afraid to touch him. 

As much as I feel an urgency to change the system on a broader level, there is still something much more real about being at "the bedside" and being of value to others, one individual at a time. In any field that involves service, specifically healthcare, that ability to touch someone, literally and figuratively, is a tremendous honor and privilege.