On that "shelter homeless, feed the poor" thing---

[melannen]

This morning, my mother met up with several people from church to do a normal maintenance work day. When they got there, they discovered that there was blood everywhere, and then found a man, barely conscious, curled up in bloody blankets in a corner with his wrists slit. He must have been either new to the area, or somebody who had been trying very hard to avoid getting help, because neither the director of the local homeless center - who'd come to help with the maintenance, and knows basically everyone who's been through the center - nor the assistant manager of the hot dog cart, who was recently part of that community himself, and came in to see what was up - had ever seen him before.

I am going to admit that the second thing I thought - after I knew he was alive, stable, and securely in the system - was "ooh, I have a violent crime scene to explore!" This sounds terribly callous, but I always knew I had more than one thing in common with Sherlock Holmes, and anyway, I'm pretty sure it's an ordinary human reaction - my mom called me to come help them not so much to help clean as to bring a camera so she could get pictures of all the bloodspatter. All comments about tragedy and the way the American system fails the disabled and or/poor can please be taken as read, yes? Because we all know all that already? Instead I'm going to talk about the blood.

As best we could work out after the police, paramedics, and CSI had come and gone, he had been camping in the woods behind our church for about a day or so (the church owns several acres of woods and we let homeless people camp back there as long as they don't start fires or fights or otherwise act as bad tenants). Sometime late last night, he appears to have slit his wrists, lain bleeding in his camp for awhile, and then, after the bleeding slowed, come up to the church building, where he broke a window to get in to the sanctuary. He managed *not* to leave much blood in the sanctuary (which is good, since it has carpets) but a trail of blood smears leads from the sanctuary door to the men's bathroom, where he either tried to clean and stanch the wounds (but instead broke them open again) or purposely tried to re-open them and bleed out more - anyway, huge spatters of blood all over the floor and the sink, smears on the walls, bloody toilet paper and paper towels everywhere. It looks like he tried to stop up the sink, which makes me wonder if he was trying to soak his wounds in warm (or, possible, cold) water. Then he made it in to the fellowship hall, where he left *puddles* of blood everywhere, got into the leftovers in the fridge, and curled up by the oven in some drop-cloths he pulled off the Koreans' drum kit, and bled.

And OMG, so much blood. We thought there was so much blood inside that we couldn't believe he was still alive, much less conscious. And then I went out to where the camp was, and there were two comforters out there that were literally *dripping* blood. So much blood. I'm sure I'm not the first person in my network who's had to help clean up after slit wrists, but the image I had was of someone just decorously sinking away next to a bathtub, not an entire building full of spatters and smears and pools of blood.

So much blood.

Anyway, the next time I have to write something that involves lots of bloodshed, I have real life experience to call on! Also cleaning up lots of bloodshed, I have experience of that now too. It's a lot less pretty and a lot less neat than it looks on TV. Also, the thicker puddles were peeling and curling up as they dried, which I had not expected at all - I thought at first that someone had tried to scrape it up, but it was just peeling itself up. And it brought up the layers and layers of old floor wax with it. So if you've ever been someplace with one of those horrible institutional waxed tile floors, and there's a mysterious blotch that looks much paler and cleaner than the rest of it? Cleaner than bleach can get it? Now you know. Puddle of human blood.

Also I wore a pair of old black corduroys that already had some bleach spots on them, and I got a lot more bleach on them in the course of cleaning up, so I gave in to a long-standing temptation and covered them in pale-brown leopard spots, just like in just so stories.

So, that happened.

Well, at least the local homeless people seem to have gotten the idea that our church is a place you can go when you're at the very end of your resources. So we must be doing something right.

ETA: Right, probably not the right night to finally watch Shaun of the Dead then, oops.

Comments

[sara]

AUGH. That is all.

I hope the guy is getting really vigorously rehydrated at the hospital.

[melannen]

The EMTs said he would probably be okay physically, so presumably he is getting rehydrated or transfused or whatever. I just hope he is getting at least a few days in a psych ward and not getting thrown right back out on the street or into general lockup. :/ And that the homeless center people will be able to keep track of him when he does get discharged.