On the edge of life and death

LOLITA HARPER

He was introduced to her as John Doe.

It was a sunny afternoon at Hoag Hospital, where Lorraine Clancey

works as an emergency medical technician. He was between 20 and 30

and had a gunshot wound to the chest.

She watched with wide eyes as the doctors cracked open his ribs

and tried to massage his heart. After about five minutes of working

on him, they called it quits.

“He was in cardiac arrest before we even got him,” she said. “He

was already gone.”

The words come out of her mouth so matter-of-factly. She is

talking about her work. Talking about heart rates and toe tags like

the rest of us talk about accounts payable and receivable. She is not

cold, bitter or unfeeling. She is real. Those are the things that

happen in her field, but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t feel.

“We don’t see that much around here, so when he came in with a

gunshot wound, everyone wants to be around,” the 19-year-old Costa

Mesa resident said. “It may sound strange, but it was exciting and

tragic at the same time. I wanted to see it, to learn. It wasn’t that

sad at the moment.”

In retrospect, it is weird to think about. It turns out, the man

was closer to her age than she thought. The more she learned about

him in later days, the more she thought about it.

“I know that guy didn’t wake up that morning and think to himself,

I wonder if I am going to die today,” she said.

His was a short life. He symbolized unrealized dreams and a

parent’s worse nightmare. The loss of his life was tragic, but it is

the death of an elderly woman that hit her the hardest.

Lorraine brought her hand to her face and looked down, as if

searching on the ground for the words to describe the flurry of

emotions she experiences in that emergency room. She stroked her

short blond ponytail and looked back up.

“I cried,” she admits. “I had never seen anybody die like that.

Not right in front of me, where there was nothing I could do.”

Lorraine can’t remember the woman’s original ailment but remembers

she had signed a document that prohibited hospital personnel from

trying to revive her. Her condition was such that she was beyond

help, and Lorraine had to watch and wait for the woman to die so she

could do her job and get the woman ready for the morgue.

Lorraine eyed the monitor as her heart rate dropped slowly from 50

beats per minute to 45 to 40 to 35 to 30 to 25 ... . She waited and

watched the numbers count down until the woman was technically dead.

“It seemed like an eternity,” Lorraine said.

Tears formed in the corners of her eyes, while she watched the

woman pass away. Then, it was time for work. Lorraine tied the

woman’s chin closed and her arms together as is customary when

preparing patients for the morgue. She took special care in cleaning

the elderly stranger, she said.

“I paid my respects that way,” Lorraine said.

Once alone, out of her scrubs and away from the workplace,

Lorraine let the tears loose. She often thinks about the fragility of

life and the looming certainty of death.

“It’s weird because I don’t know these people at all but they

teach me so much -- it’s really just incredible.”

* LOLITA HARPER writes columns Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and

covers culture and the arts. She may be reached at (949) 574-4275 or

by e-mail at [email protected].