The room extends back about a hundred feet or so, the walls lined with shelves that hold every conceivable type of medical or personal care supply. In the middle of the room are groupings of hospital beds, wheelchairs, oxygen tanks, and other pieces of large equipment. At the back of the room is another metal door, this one with a push-bar handle and a red EXIT sign overhead. Directly to my right, nestled in the corner, is a small glass-enclosed office. The lights are on and one of the drawers to a big metal filing cabinet is standing open, but there is no one in there. In fact, there is no one anywhere that I can see.
“Hello?” I try. “Is anyone here?” Not so much as a whisper. Goose bumps raise along my arms.
On the far side of the room I see another closed door located midway down the wall. There is a piece of paper taped to it and I move closer until I can make out what is written on it: REST ROOM. I breathe a sigh of relief as I realize the gaunt man is probably in the john. Knowing what I do about the effects of AIDS and its treatments, it isn’t a stretch to think he might have some physical problems that require a lot of bathroom time. I decide to wait a little longer but after another few minutes of the eerie silence, I can’t take any more. I move toward the bathroom door, intending to knock on it—courtesy be damned—but slow when something beneath it catches my eye.
I gasp when I realize it is a pool of dark red blood that has oozed under the door from inside the bathroom and is now spreading its way across the floor. My nursing instincts kick in and I rush toward the door, trying to sidestep the gruesome puddle. I grab the doorknob and discover the door is locked.
I knock loudly. “Hello? Sir? Are you okay in there?” I holler. I lean close and listen but hear nothing. I try again, this time pounding on the door with my fist. “Hello? Are you okay in there?” Still nothing. And the circle of red at my feet is growing. I study the doorknob, see one of those little holes you find on interior doors and realize I can get the thing unlocked if I can find something small enough to poke in there.
I head to the corner office, search around and spy a container of paper clips. Grabbing one, I bend it out as straight as I can and hurry back to the bathroom, where I jam it into the hole in the doorknob. After groping around for several seconds I finally hear a click and turn the knob. The door opens only a few inches before meeting some sort of resistance. Pushing harder, I feel the tiniest bit of give and strengthen my efforts, eventually getting a wide enough space to stick my head into the room.
And then wish I hadn’t.
The gaunt fellow I saw earlier is, indeed, in the bathroom. Though to be honest, I can’t be 100 percent sure it is him since his face is badly misshapen and part of his head is missing. But the clothes, the overall physique, and the Kaposi’s sarcoma I can see on his neck suggest it is the same man. He is wedged between the toilet and the door, his head—or what’s left of it—is turned to one side and one leg is crunched up between the toilet and the wall. On the floor, in his right hand, is a gun. His index finger is loosely curled around the trigger.
Aided by adrenaline, I push the door as hard as I can, shoving the man’s prostrate body through the slick pool of red that surrounds him until I can squeeze myself into the room. I kneel down and instinctively start to place my fingers along the carotid artery in his neck, but then I stop myself. There is no doubt this man is dead. His skin is dark and dusky and there is brain matter splattered on the floor and walls. And I suspect he might have AIDS.
While I’ve seen some pretty gross things in my nursing career, and there aren’t many things that bother me anymore, something about this scene makes my stomach churn threateningly. Maybe it’s the close quarters, which seem to concentrate that awful, charnel smell. Or maybe it’s the sudden awareness that I am alone with this corpse, isolated and far from help. I stand, turning my head away from the body and toward the sink, feeling like I might throw up. Eventually the feeling passes and the clinical side of my brain takes over again.
Reluctantly, I look back toward the body, trying to recall some of the things I have read in the office library or been told by Izzy regarding the assessment of a death scene. Too late, I realize I have already contaminated a fair amount of the evidence simply by entering the room and moving the body as much as I did to get through the door. Still, given what I can see, it seems pretty obvious that the man has committed suicide—stuck a gun to his head and blown a good part of it away.
Carefully, hoping not to contaminate the scene any further, I work my way out of the room and head back to the small office, where I grab the phone off the desk and punch in 911.
“9-1-1 operator. Do you have an emergency?”
“Well, it’s not exactly an emergency,” I tell the woman. “But I have a dead man here.”
“You have a dead man there?” she repeats, her voice shrill.
“That’s right. He shot himself.”
“Is this 2104 Callaway Road?”
“Yes, I believe so. I’m at Halverson Medical Supply.”
“Um…may I have your name, please?”
“Mattie. Mattie Winston.”
“Okay, Mattie. Um…I will…I am dispatching police and emergency rescue to the scene and they should be there shortly. Um, let’s stay calm. Panic is our enemy.”
So far, the only person who seems to be panicking is the operator. “I’m okay,” I tell her.
“Okay…um…can you tell me the victim’s name?”
“I don’t know who he is.”
“Okay. Okay. Um…are you near the victim?”
“Not really. He’s in a bathroom a little ways from here.”
“Are you using a portable phone?”
I am, and say so.
“Okay. Good. Um…I want you to go back to the victim and listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you. We’re going to render some first aid until the rescue team arrives, okay?” Her voice wavers as if she is about to burst into tears.
“I really don’t think first aid will help at this point,” I tell her as I make my way back to the bathroom. I wince when I see the bloody footprints I’ve tracked across the floor. “He’s dead.”
“Please,” she says. “Stay calm and listen to me. What you and I do in the next few minutes may save this man’s life.”
I can hear the frantic rustling of papers in the background and figure it is her step-by-step CPR instructions. I sigh. “Pardon my bluntness, ma’am, but nothing you or I can do will save this man’s life. He is dead. Very dead.”
“We can’t be sure of that,” she says quickly, her voice high and squeaky. “Sometimes people only look dead.”
“No, I’m certain he’s dead. Totally and completely dead.” Some dark corner of my mind urges me to sing out in a Munchkin voice: “He’s really most sincerely dead.”
“Now, please, don’t panic. Just do what I say. I want you to go to the man and look to see if he is breathing.”
“Look, I’m a nurse. I know what I’m looking at here and this man—”
“If he isn’t breathing, then you will need to give him artificial respiration, or mouth-to-mouth breathing. To do that, you first need to open his airway by tipping his head back. Place one hand beneath his chin and the other one on his forehead.”
There is a rote quality to her voice that tells me she is reading what she’s saying. “You don’t understand,” I interrupt. “He—”
“Then you need to tip his head back by lifting up under the chin and exerting downward pressure on the forehead. Then—”