How Helping a Stranger With a Severed Finger Saved My Life
Story By Kim Porter
I was suicidally depressed, until a bloody emergency reminded me what I'm capable of.
A
s soon as I sit down on the stoop in front of my friend’s house, my body sags. And not just because of the arduous climb up this ridiculously steep hill. And not just because halfway up the hill my four-year-old daughter Colette collapsed in mutiny, refusing to take another step and I had to lug her the rest of the way on my back. And not just because my friend is late and we’re stuck here waiting as the four p.m. San Francisco fog rolls in, kicking up gritty wind and making the temperature plummet. But because I’m depressed, and every time my body stops moving, melancholia drops anchor.
I try to put on a good face for my kid, but I’m failing. I’ve been this way for months now. When I talk, my voice sounds hollow and far off. When I walk, I drag my feet. When I wake up in the morning, I feel pummeled by the specter of yet another day. And I’ve developed an unsympathetic inner-monologist who narrates my activities, “You’re so depressed, even this donut can’t make you happy. You should probably just kill yourself; nobody would miss you.” It’s as if I’ve split into two people, a middle-aged-sad-sack and a middle-school-mean-girl, and I don’t want to be either of them.
My friend lives at the top of a street so traumatically narrow and steep, drivers, not knowing it’s a dead end, have to back down the hill – sobbing – because there’s no place to turn around. I know, because that happened to me once, which is why I walked here today.
This is Treat Street, a sturdy little avenue that runs across San Francisco, through the Mission District, and ends at Precita Park. But if you go around Precita Park, you’ll find this one last alpine block of Treat, at the top of which I now sit with my ‘C’-shaped spine, aching and navel-gazing. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a man approaching and I think, “Oh, great. Now what?”
“Por favor. Call 911,” the man says. “Finger. Cut.” He authenticates his succinct claim by holding up his blood-streaked fore-arm. With his left hand, he is clenching a wad of handkerchief around his right pinky.
“No. Have. Phone.” I say, as if English is also my second language.
“Have phone,” he says and dips his chin toward his front pants pocket.
I don’t want to stick my hand in there, but the blood does look real, so I gesture for my kid to stay on the stoop and I move toward him. In his pocket, I find a flip-phone. I slip it out and step back out of arms’ reach, then call 911.
The operator answers and after I give her the address I say, “I’m here with this guy, and he says he cut his finger.”
“Is it bad?” the operator asks.
“Is it bad?” I ask him.
“Si.”
“It’s bad,” I tell her.
“Did he cut it off?”
Now there’s a question I hadn’t thought of. “Did you cut it off?”
“Si.” He sighs, relieved someone finally understands the gravity of his situation.
“Yes. He cut it off.”
“Where is it?” the operator asks.
“Where is it?” My voice goes so high and tight my throat burns.
“Upstairs,” he says and points with his elbow to the house next door.
“Go get it,” she instructs me.
Oh. “O.K.,” I say.
I admonish my kid, “Do not move a muscle,” and I leave her sitting on the stoop as I follow the man toward the house.
Inside, we are immediately greeted by a staircase, which is missing all of its treads. I follow the man up the stairs, balancing on narrow vertical strips of wood, narrating to the 911 operator, “We have entered the premises and are ascending the stairs.” We get to the kitchen and I see a table saw, a stack of lumber, and an arc of blood spatter across the ceiling, but I don’t see the finger.
“We are attempting to locate the finger,” I say, because even in an emergency, silence over a phone line is awkward.
I thought a severed finger would jump right out at me, but I cannot find it. I lift up each foot and look underneath to be sure I’ve not already stepped on it. I’m getting that jumpy, tight-shouldered feeling like when you’ve lost sight of a spider that was on your ceiling a moment ago.
“Do you see it?” I ask him.
He points. With his elbow. At his own finger.
The finger lies disenfranchised on the floor beside the table saw, drained of color, and curved slightly. It looks ashamed of itself, hunched over like a scolded dog. I have to pick it up but I don’t have any rubber gloves or tongs so I rip a paper towel from the roll and lay it over the finger, pinching delicately, the way you might pick up a harmless but terrifying bug, a bug you wouldn’t want to crush but you wouldn’t want to see escape and run up your arm either.
“We have secured the finger,” I tell the operator.
“Hang tight. The ambulance is on its way.”
I cradle the swaddled finger back down the skeletal stairs, being careful not to squeeze too hard. I don’t want to collapse all the delicate little doo-dads at the business end because I’m assuming they’ll need those when they reattach it.
When we get outside I see that Colette is still sitting where I left her and it’s still daylight, which surprises me, because it felt like we’d been on our finger-recovery mission for hours.
We sit on the stoop, and wait for the ambulance, which we can hear approaching in the distance. We listen to the siren growing louder and louder as the ambulance approaches, and just when we’re expecting to see the flashing lights at the bottom of Treat Street, the siren begins to grow quieter and quieter, as if the ambulance has turned around and is driving away. The man looks at me with the whites of his eyes showing all the way around.
“Sounds like they’re going the wrong way. Are they leaving?” I ask the operator.
After a brief silence she returns with, “They couldn’t find you. The address does not exist.”
I sit up straight. “No! Tell them to come back and drive around the park! We’re on the other side of the park. Drive around the park!”
“It’s O.K.,” I tell the man. “They’ll be here soon.”
I can see all the fear he’s been staving off overtake him. A tear appears on the rim of his eye where it balances for a second before it spills out and runs down his cheek. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I’m thinking, What if he has a wife and kids depending on him and he can’t go back to work? What if he doesn’t have insurance? Or isn’t in the country legally?
“You’re going to be O.K.,” I say.
He looks dubious.
“You are very strong,” I tell him, and I put my free hand on his saw-dust covered back.
“Gracias,” he says.
“De nada. Esta no problemo,” I say, emboldened enough to risk mangling a little bit of my middle-school Spanish. I rub my free hand in a circle on his back.
The ambulance arrives. They hustle him into the back and they’re off.
Colette and I are watching the ambulance backing down the hill when I realize I’m still holding the finger. I run after them, waving my arm and screaming, “The finger! Stop! The finger!” I hand off the finger to the paramedic and watch as they drive away.
* * *
T
hroughout the evening, I find I can’t stop worrying about the man. I feel invested, but I don’t even know his name. I decide to call the hospital.
“Hi,” I say, trying to sound humble, “I helped a guy who cut off his finger, and I don’t even know his name, but I’m wondering if he came to your hospital.”
The nurse says, “Kim?”
“Ye-ees?” I say, feeling mystified.
“It’s me. Katanya.”
Katanya is the mother of one of my daughter’s classmates. We barely know each other. I find it miraculous that she recognizes my voice.
She says, “His name is Jose Ramos, and he’s waiting for surgery. Would you like to leave a message?”
“No. I don’t want to bug him. I just wanted to be sure he was O.K.”
The next morning, I wake up into the lull that follows a meaningful day. I feel restless and let down. I don’t know what to do with myself. I decide to call the hospital again.
This time I’m put through to Jose’s room. “How was the surgery?”
“No surgery,” he says. “No enough blood.”
Whatever that means.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say, picturing his little guilty bloodless finger. “Do you need anything?”
Jose says, “No, gracias,” and then launches into Spanish. I can’t understand what he’s saying, but I can hear in the tone of his voice the same letting-your-guard-down feeling I feel. Which makes sense. It’s impossible to carry around a person’s chopped-off body part and not feel a little camaraderie. I presume that’s true for the carry-ee as well.
Later that day, as I am pushing Colette on the tire swing at the park I remember that old – allegedly Chinese – proverb about how if you save someone’s life you are responsible for them for the rest of their life. Which never made sense to me before. Shouldn’t the person who got saved owe a perpetual debt and not the other way around? But, today, I get it. It’s a great honor to help someone in need, even if all you did was push three buttons on a phone and carry a couple ounces of former human for fifteen minutes. I want to keep doing it.
I find I can’t get back to normal, no matter how hard I try – and, frankly, I’m not trying very hard because my old normal was awful, all that sitting sadly in one room or another, staring into space, imagining how much better off the world would be without me—why would I want to go back to that?
I start keeping a lookout for other people in need of rescuing. I push a stalled car out of the road, I aid a disoriented cyclist when her bike gets clipped by a car, I flag down a security guard in a lobby when I see an elderly man stumbling and clutching his chest, I adopt a dog,
Then one day, a month or two after the finger incident, I realize I have completely forgotten to be depressed. I’ve been so busy playing the role of local hero that I’ve neglected to drag my feet and stare into space and fantasize about the world without me. I notice that donuts taste good, and my voice sounds normal, and when my body stops moving, melancholia no longer drops anchor.
More than a decade has passed since Jose’s accident. Periodically I put the search terms “Jose” plus “Ramos” plus “finger” into Google on the off-chance that he’s looking for me. I wish I could see him again, to see how he’s getting on without his finger. But more importantly, to thank him, because when he lost his finger, he saved my life.
This story appeared in the May 2018 Reader's Digest
A very long time ago I heard this wonderful story about a family that was very concerned about their daughter. She was depressed and everything they did to help her - was not helping. Finally they asked a psychology friend what they might do to help their daughter.
His answer? Buy 100 plants and have her care for them as she finds someone to give them them away to - one by one. This they did!
About a year later the parents the ran into this psychology friend. They had a great time catching up! Then he asked, "What happened with your daughters problem"?
They replied "What problem"?
Service is everything!!
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