complich8′s journal

The thing that determines whether we are good citizens or not is whether we help others in their crises, or ignore them.

That’s what I believe, anyway.

Today I was sitting here in work, like any other day. Things happened, very typical work stuff. The boss left, and I was pricing some systems to finally upgrade the oldest and slowest in the lab, and move them on out of here.

And then the phone rang, and I went to answer it, thinking “this is just like any other call … firdosh isn’t here, and jenny isn’t here, and it’s for them”. But I went and answered it anyway, and it absolutely wasn’t.

It was the boss, who had left and gone to the drawing room downstairs to play the piano for a while before going home. She was terrified and panicked, because someone “was sick or something”. So I went down to see what was going on, and sure enough, there’s a guy lying in the entryway, breathing very laboriously, eyes opening and closing but not locking on anything. Boss didn’t really know what was going on, but I had some idea…

This kid was lying there having a seizure. And that’s something we weren’t really ready to deal with.

The older gentleman (I believe a professor here) that got there before me was on his way to call an abulance when I got downstairs, so I didn’t. They got there about 2 minutes after he came around enough to try to sit up and to speak. The older guy had sort of taken charge of the situation, so I was mostly there for boss-support at that point. He asked the kid his name, and the kid had trouble remembering it. First he could remember his first but not his last name, then when the ambulance got there he could remember his first and last name but not his parent’s names. The paramedics took over by then, and called his parents up while checking his pulse and blood pressure and such and getting him back into full consciousness-mode.

I think it was another 10 minutes or so before his parents got there, but … with the state he was in when he came out of it, I can’t help but think of how stuck and disoriented he’d be if nobody had come across him or done anything for him.

I wonder how many people would have just walked on by, these days. I also wonder if I’m one of them. I guess I’ve never really had that tested … so I can’t really know for sure.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 7:53 pm and is filed under life and times, observational. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.