"Red Blood Cells, Aisle Three" by Kris Hines

I just started a new job at Standard Heating and Cooling on Monday. It had been a great week of learning about furnaces, air conditioners, sheet metal, fittings and all the duct work parts that a contractor would need to outfit a house with a new heating or cooling system. I was the person who pulled the orders that the contractors called in. I had made it through the week without a cut. Brian, my boss said all week. “Sheet metal is sharp and it will cut you bad!” He told me stories of people he knew that had cut their hands in half. I was afraid to cut myself.

Today is Friday, August 30, 2001. I wake up as usual, showered, got dressed and ate a little breakfast. Brian was also my roommate at the time. We went to the warehouse and opened up for business as usual. I wish I would have known, this was not going to be a good day. Our delivery driver and I were given a pick-list for a contractor and began pulling items needed. We pulled the sheet metal, the fittings and the elbows for the duct work. The next thing to pull was the transition pieces. Transition duct takes a heat duct from eighteen inches to twenty-four inches. I climbed the ladder and grabbed a piece and found two were stuck together.
I turned to our driver and said. “These are stuck together.”

He replied, “Hand them down and I will pull them apart. You don’t want to do it up on the ladder.”

“Ok,” I said

I turned to climb down the ladder a few steps. When I turned, I lost my footing. I teetered left, then right thinking I would steady myself. Wrong! I came off the ladder, pieces of transition still in hand. I slammed to the floor with a jolt to my back. A pain shot through my right arm and everything faded to white. I could not see. My body went into shock, blinding me from seeing the bloody mess that was my arm. I had landed on my feet, which jolted my back and the pieces of transition in my left hand swung around and sliced through my skin in my right forearm.

“Are you ok?” asked our driver, seeing all the blood as I turned towards his voice. “That is a lot of blood! Brian! Bring me some towels! Kris fell from the ladder and sliced himself on these pieces of heat duct.”

“All this blood is from that?” Brian asked, “Wrap his arm and get him to my truck!”
They helped me walk to his truck and we were on the road in an instant. Well, that is what it felt like for me. I could hear the racing of the engine, which meant Brian, was speeding. I could feel the pull of gravity left and right. I found out later, it was because we were weaving between construction cones, in the construction zone he drove right through. It didn’t matter to him that the road was closed.

I asked Brian, “Where are we were going?”

He said, “To the hospital! Let me focus on the road and you relax.”

I told him, “I could not see. Everything was white.”

“You’ll be ok, just relax we’re almost there,” he reassured me.

We pulled up to the Emergency room entrance and my eye sight started coming back. He ran in and grabbed a nurse, who grabbed a wheel chair to get me into the hospital.
My memory in the emergency room is a little fuzzy. They gave me pain medicine and laid me in a bed. My arm was up on a table so they could examine it and clean out any pieces of metal that might be in the cut. I remember the doctor cleaning out the wound and talking to me but what was said I do not remember. After cleaning the wound they took me to the operating room, laid me out on the table, stuck me in the arm pit, and said, “Count backwards from ninety-nine.” I started. “99, 98, 97.” I woke up later in my hospital bed with my roommate sitting there. He told me the doctor would be in in a bit to tell me what damage I had done to my arm.

We talked a little while. He told me that I didn’t need to worry about work and to just get better. The job will be there when I am healed. He also told me that they had cleaned up the mess at the warehouse. “Isle three is now where we keep the red blood cells,” he said jokingly. I said, “Very funny!” I was in a lot of pain so I pushed the button in my hand that delivers pain medicine to me. I went to sleep.