Ambivalence: 15 minutes

How long it took someone to help my newly-paralyzed friend

I hadn’t heard from my friend in a few weeks but that wasn’t anything new.  We’d gone years without talking before. No reason to think that there was anything behind this absence.  That’s why it took so many reading attempts to process what he was saying in his text one Sunday morning.  Ice?  Bruised spine?  You’ve been in the hospital for HOW long??

On February 7, my friend slipped on black ice while walking to work and fell backward.  He tells me that the only reason he didn’t give himself a concussion was because a trench had been dug out where his head otherwise would have landed. Apparently, his head never actually touched the ground during this whole experience.

In a way, his spinal cord is a hero. It kinda caught his fall as it landed on a knob of ice on the ground. Two overeager vertebrae connecting with planet Earth first kept his head from making that first impact. Sadly, he hasn’t had the function or feeling of anything blow his elbows or knees ever since.

So my newly-paralyzed friend found himself laying prostrate with his head dangling over a small chasm in broad daylight in downtown Minneapolis. You can imagine the sounds he was producing because of such an event. And yet, it took fifteen minutes for someone to see if he needed help. No, that’s not right. It was obvious he needed help. He was screaming that he couldn’t feel his arms and legs. Fewer things are more universally understood as “He needs help” than a man who is screaming he can’t feel his arms and legs. No, it took fifteen minutes for someone to give a shit. Not just a rando someone. It took a nearby homeless person to give a shit. It took a nearby homeless person to find out what had happened, to try to help him up, and then to call 911. (The fact that a homeless person had a cellphone is fuel for two more substack rants about our society.)

And my friend has been in a hospital ever since. Haunted by the phantom sensation of his limbs and his real-life experience that demonstrated what trash-people society has become. That anything in the world could ever be more important than helping a man impaled on the ground screaming that he can’t feel his arms and legs.

All of that was disturbing enough to receive mid-service one Sunday morning at my church job. But it was this final piece that permanently changed me and how I see humanity to my core. If he had landed just a few inches higher up his spine, he would have died. Not from the initial impact but because he would have lost all control of his body beneath his neck. Without his core engaged throughout the time he lay prostrate on that bulge of ice, waiting for one of the many passersby to give a shit, he would have suffocated from his own weight and died in the street in front of all of Minneapolis.

Yep. People suck.