To the rescue

Yesterday at lunchtime I walked into the bathroom at work to pee, only to discover a woman who works down the hall from me lying on the bathroom floor in a heap. My first thought was that something horrible had happened to her, like a heart attack or a stroke, so I was incredibly relieved when my desperate, "Oh my god what happened are you OK?" was met with an explanation of how she'd slipped on the wet floor and fallen, twisting her knee. Not that hurting your knee is anything to sneeze at, but Jesus, I was so afraid that it was something much more serious.

Anyway, she told me that she had tried to get up but couldn't, and that the pain was excruciating, and I really didn't know what to do. I felt totally helpless. She wanted to get up but I told her I didn't think it was a good idea to move it, not knowing what was wrong with it. And I asked her if she wanted me to call an ambulance, and she said no. Although in retrospect, maybe it doesn't make sense to ask the injured person lying on the floor if they want an ambulance, because they aren't likely to be in an incredibly good position for making reasonable decisions.

So I called out to somebody in the hallway to get someone from the woman's department, someone she knew. And when she insisted on getting up because she didn't want to be on the bathroom floor (and really, who could blame her?), I rolled a desk chair over so that we could get her up without her having to move herself. Because she kept insisting that she could hop on her good leg, and I was envisioning her losing her balance and instinctively putting all her weight on her injured knee and crashing to the ground again in unbearable agony, and/or doing permanent damage to her knee.

By then there was a small crowd gathered, and someone got her a second chair so she could elevate her leg, and someone from our benefits department came over (possibly because she was injured at work? And so worker's comp could be involved? I really don't know), and everyone was saying she should get ice, and freaking out because nobody had an ice pack. So I went to the freezer and found a bag of frozen peas, and brought that back because it seemed just as good as an ice pack.

She had so many people around her by then, and they were talking about calling her mother, who worked just down the street, to drive her to the hospital, and since I didn't even know her I felt like I should just leave at that point, so I did, and later found out that they had wound up calling an ambulance to take her to the hospital, which I think was the right choice because the other option was wheeling her down there in a crappy desk chair, and I really do not think that would have been a good idea.

But I have to say, the whole thing scared me. Beyond the initial fright that I got when I thought she'd had some sort of episode, it was scary to me that I was the person to find her, that I didn't really know what to do but that I still seemed to know what to do more than most of the other people there, that of all the people gathered around nobody was taking charge more than I was, nobody knew what the best thing to do would be, nobody could offer sound advice, and it took almost half an hour before an ambulance was called.

It just makes me wonder what would happen in a real emergency, when having someone there who thinks of using a rolling desk chair and a bag of frozen peas won't cut it, and you need someone with a bit more expertise or the ability to take charge. I felt like a lot of people froze in that situation, waiting for someone else to tell them what to do, to handle things for them. And I felt that way too. Yes, I got the chair and the makeshift ice pack, but I still felt like I was feeling my way around in the dark, and that what we really needed was someone much more capable than me to come by and tell us all what really needed to be done.

So I don't know. Maybe in a real emergency people step up their game? Or maybe we are all so conditioned to just wait for instruction that we would all sit around like lemmings, internally thinking, "Not it" and waiting for someone else to save the day. I hope not. And I also hope I never have to find out.