Death by ambivalence???

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, it’s been a really busy and crazy fall.  Life at work has been just as crazy.  I had another kid die on me back at Halloween in an accident.  That made three for the year.  Death is just part of the job that we accept, but kids…kids are different. So I took a couple of weeks’ of much needed vacation off to get my head back on straight.  I had hoped my first shift back would be relatively quiet.  I was wrong.

We get a lot of frequent flyers in this job; people we transport on what seem like a regular basis, some good, some bad.  There’s Mrs. Sugarman the diabetic lady. We get called to her house at least once a month, but nobody seems to mind because she’s as sweet as her name and she has no family so we’re the closest thing she has sometimes.  Then there’s people like Agnes that lives in one of $29 a night motels.  We get the pleasure of seeing her at least twice a month.  She’s not nearly as sweet.  We don’t always pick up our frequent flyers in the same place.  Like last shift, we took a guy out of the jail that we recognized as soon as we saw him; it was the “Prefer not to guy” from the business district.

We were called to the jail to transport an unconscious guy, by the name of Bartelby, who had reportedly not eaten in days.  The jail nurse said their shrink saw him and said that he wasn’t on a hunger strike, protest, or even in a deep depression; he just preferred not to (eat).  Cheese and I had encountered this guy twice before.  We were called to a law office downtown a couple of months ago.  The owner of the firm called us because he thought one of his law clerks was having a psychotic break.  It seems the guy moved himself into the office and had ceased to do any work at all.  When we examined the guy, everything checked out.  The only thing was that he answered most questions by saying, “I’d prefer not too”.  Since he was medically stable and no threat to himself we left him there much to the dismay of this attorney.  Fast forward a couple of weeks and Cheese and I are back at this same office.  This time the attorney had moved out, but Mr. Prefer Not Too decided to stay.  When the new tenants moved in they called again thinking this guy was suffering some type of psychological issue.  Once again he checked out and we left.  I did tell the new tenants that they always had the option of calling the police and having him forcefully removed if they wanted to.  I guess they took me up on the advice because here he is now in the jail.  Since he was unconscious we transported him this time to the hospital.  After some IV fluids on the way in he actually was awake by the time we got to the ER.  When we left, I secretly hoped we’d not ever see him again, and sadly I got my wish.  We were back in the ER later that night and I asked one of the nurses what they ended up doing with Bartelby.  She told me he had died about an hour ago.  I guess he had remained lucid enough to talk to one of the hospital shrinks while he was there and they ruled out any psych issues.  It seems that he just “preferred not too”.  So I asked, “You’re telling me this guy died of ambivalence?”  She agreed.  Mark your history books folks!  The first every case of death by ambivalence occurred right here.  Shake my head…I need to go back on vacation!