I met a boy this week. He is 16. He told me that he likes school and gets good grades. He asked me if I like my job; he wants to be a firefighter. We had this conversation as I was shoving gauze into the nearly 20 bullet holes tunneling into his body.
He is lucky that he was able to have a conversation at all. I feel lucky to have had one with him. The first day I took care of him he was still intubated and sedated, unable to talk, barely responding to commands to move his fingers and toes. He nodded yes and no to the questions a detective asked him. Police, nurses, and surgeons were all impressed that he was alive after the shooting, when whoever did this to him stood over him and fired repeatedly into his chest.
He told me that he isn't in a gang, that he was in the wrong place in the wrong time. The detective seems to think someone close to him is in a gang and that's why he was targeted. Regardless of who he knows, what he does in his spare time, or where he was at any given time, it is all so SENSELESS. It makes me angry at a society that has bred children who shoot other children; a system where guns are so plentiful and readily available. Mind you, I have never been a proponent of gun control.... but seeing up close and personal the havoc they wreak on a human body has definitely given me food for thought.
I probably won't see him again. Today is my day off, and by the time I am back on this weekend he will most likely have been moved out of the ICU to make room for the next patient or victim, shuffled along through the hospital until he is stable enough to go home and continue the long recovery process that surely lies ahead of him. He can't move or feel anything on one of his limbs now. I hope that the surgeons are able to work some miracle and restore full function to him. He will need it if he wants to fight fires someday.
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