CW: death.

The boy was sixteen, and his body had been sitting in the little glass trauma room for six hours. He’d been at a big family reunion at a nearby lake-recreation area. By nearby, I mean a 45 minute ambulance ride to the rural emergency room where I was training. The exhausted EMTs had done their duty and performed CPR the entire way back, but over the radio during the trip they’d been telling us they already knew it was too late. It was too late by the time they got there, because the lake was also a 45 minute ride before the ambulance got to him in the first place. Someone in the family had brought a four wheel ATV and the kid finished up lunch and drove it off away up a nearby hill. His whole family saw him hit the rock that flipped the ATV backwards on top of him. It was too late by the time the adults got to him. 

When he got to us at our little hospital, our job was to clean him up for the family. I helped take out the breathing tube and IV. My doc had a son just a couple years older than this boy. After his parents had said their goodbyes they agreed to donate his tissue and organs. Unfortunately the extended ambulance time without a pulse made his heart and organs non-viable. Later someone came for the tendons in his knees. The technician who came down from the city for his corneas let me assist. He delicately removed the tissue from the surface of that boy’s eyes with a scalpel and used tweezers to place the cloudy circles into the little cups I held as steady as I could.

I’m not sure what amazes me more: that through all the sadness, it felt so cool to help, or that cool as it was, I felt so sad.  It’s been almost 20 years so there’s no way I can claim to remember many details about this kid with clarity. I remember the fracture in the back of his skull, and I remember his eyes.