When I was going to Respiratory Therapy school I took a job at a local hospital as a janitor. This was mainly so I had an in with the organization after I graduated and would go on to work there for 7 years as a RT. But before all that I was a janitor. I mainly worked in the evenings. I liked it for the most part. It was pretty chill, all the riff raff in a hospital is out the door around 5p so I could get my rooms cleaned or whatever I had to do and then watch TV in the clinic wing until it was time to go home.
One evening I was working and I happened to be down by the ER and this dude comes in carrying a bloodied up kid. Apparently there was a farm equipment accident and this kid, he was probably like 5, got run over by a tractor driven by his own father who was now frantically yelling for help while carrying his bloody mess of a kid in his arms. He just picked up the kid and bolted to town because it was quicker than getting an ambulance out to his place and he knew it.
If you have ever been in an ER when it is "go time" you know the type of organized chaos that happened next. Nurses and Drs. running all over the place. It was a small town ER so pretty much everyone who was in house who had any medical training was in the ER. An all hands on deck moment. Except for me the Janitor, I just waited outside of the ER until they were done and I would then have to go in and clean up.
The kid didn't make it. I suspect he was already dead in the arms of his father. The tractor had crushed his skull and there was not much that could be done, though all those involved tried everything and then some. So when it was my time to come in, they had moved the childs body to a room that we could get the temp way down in so his organs could be harvested and donated. I walked in there and saw the gore...and I mean it was total gore. There was blood everywhere and pieces of his skull and gray tissue on the ground by where they were working on him. I assumed at the time that the grey tissue was bits of his brain, but even to this day I am not sure. Still to this day, I am sure of this, that was the mose greusome ER post ressucitative efforts I have ever seen, except for one time when this dude was being chased by the cops and he slit his own neck ear to eat with a razor, didn't kill himself, so I had to intubate him through the giant slit in his neck. The kid with the crushed skull was much worse though because I had a young child and also it was my first time seeing first hand just what kind of fucked up shit I would see.
For a solid minute I just looked at everything and then could feel my hands begin to shake a bit and my stomach churn. But I was going to be in health care and I knew I would have to deal with the visuals of this kind of shit for the rest of my career. So I swallowed it all down. I put it all some place and went about cleaning up the bits of skull and brain and the sticky puddles of blood. I put it all some place. I am not sure where I put it but I know that if I didnt put it some where I would go insane.
Even now I am still not sure where it goes.
No real point to this story, but I wanted to type it up while it was on my mind and thought I would share. Plus it contains an anecdote about Charlie Manson. #grownostr
I was thinking about this dude named Grant I used to work with at Kodak back in the day. We got to know eachother during our allotted 15 min smoke breaks every three hours. We worked together in the Kodak film...factory, I guess for a lack of a better word. The floor we worked on operated all night and day, 24/7, making different kinds of film for Kodak. Film for movies, billboards, whatever. We had to work on it in pitch black darkness using night vision, and I remember that it was purple, except when it was exposed to light in the darkness (and subsequently ruined) then it would get like a bluish hue to it. To be honest, I would go into that job and just vacate my mind because the work was absolutely mind numbing. But the pepople I worked with there were really cool, including Grant.
Grant started at Kodak as part of a reformed prisoner hiring program. Kodak hired ex-cons and were reimbursed for part of their wages. There were a few ex-cons that we worked with but it was hard for me to tell. I am a small town kid so my interactions with former cons remains limited even to this day. With Grant I only knew because he told me one time in the darkness that had done some hard time in California (I believe he said San Quinte and I only remember that because of the connections to Johnny Cash). He seemed to know all the other employees who were part of the reformed con program, not because they talked about it, but he said he could tell just by looking at someone who had done time. "They always have an anxiousness in their eyes" I believe is what he told me.
At that time, which was the mid 2000s, Grant was in his early to mid 60s. He was build like a block of wood with a thick moustache, and those 80s glasses that were made popular by Jeffery Dhamer. He was thick all over. Thick arms, thick legs. He had a tatoo of a panther on his left leg (or some kind of jungle cat, I never really asked) and he was funny as shit. Just real quick whitted and real intellegent, though I don't think he was even able to read. He had a ton of stories about prison. The best of which I am going to recall here.
Grant claimed that he was, at one time, in the same California prison as Charles Manson. He said he mostly avoided "Charlie" because he just talked and talked and Grant couldn't stand him. Charlie left Grant alone for the most part, but there was one dude that Charlie constantly made fun of. Anyway, one time Charlie was making fun of this dude, just being really ruthless towards this guy, and later that day when Charlie, Grant and all of them were hanging out (not sure if that is the prison term or not) the dude that Charlie was making fun of comes up to the group and has a hollowed out ink pen that he had filled with lighter fluid and blew the lighter fluid in Charlie's face. He then lit the fluid on Charlie's face with a lighter, causing horrible burns on Charlie's face. That was the last time Charlie messed with the dude, according to Grant, and Charlie was later moved to another cell block and Grant never saw him again.
A few years back I thought about this story and I looked it up. Charlie's face was lit on fire in the manner that Grant described. This is a fact. Whether Grant was there or not I suppose I will never know for sure. As for Grant himself, I am not sure what ultimately became of him either. When my wife and I had our oldest daughter, we moved from Colorado and I quit Kodak to go to Respiratory Therapy school. Before I left Grant gave me a bunch of baby gifts for my daughter from him and his wife. I know they didn't have a lot of money and I always meant to keep in touch with him but I got caught up in my life and a few years after I moved I tried his phone number and it was disconnected. I can't imagine he is still alive, but if he is I hope he is doing well.
