Sometimes people will lie to you. That is just a fact of life, especially when you are a police officer and you’re talking to someone who does not want to go to jail. And sometimes they will be telling the absolute truth, but it sounds so ridiculous you have a hard time believing them. You have to keep an open mind. We all deserve the benefit of the doubt until all the facts are known.
I was reminded of this once many years ago while working a patrol shift in the early evening. I was dispatched to a call of a person lying down in the middle of the road, forcing traffic to drive around him. The dispatcher advised that two other people were at the scene trying to help the person, but he was refusing to get out of the street.
I arrived a few minutes later and was pretty confident I had found the correct location when I saw a sixteen-year-old kid lying supine in the middle of the street, arms and legs spread wide and looking like a starfish stuck on a high rock during low tide.
Two other kids were grabbing his arms and trying to drag him to the curb, but he kept thrashing and pulling out of their grip until they gave up. The two kids still on their feet saw me and ran over to my patrol car.
They told me that their friend was sick and he needed an ambulance. As they told me this, I watched the kid in the street roll onto his side and vomit. From the wet mess around him (and all over him) it was clearly not the first time he had done this. My own dinner made a quick bid for freedom, but I forced myself to swallow it back down and approach the scene.
As I got closer, I could smell the odor of alcohol. There was also an empty beer can in the gutter of the roadway. The picture was suddenly much clearer as to what had happened. I turned back to the guys by my car.
“How much has he had to drink?” I asked them.
“It was only one beer,” said one kid.
“He didn’t even finish it,” said the other.
As a police officer, the people I talk to will generally underestimate exactly how much alcohol they have put into their bodies. It seems no one wants to admit to the cops that they had too much to drink. I have arrested dozens, maybe hundreds, of people for drunk in public and driving under the influence who all swore to me that they only had “one beer.”
“No, really,” I said. “How much did he drink. He looks like he almost killed himself.”
“One beer,” they both reiterated.
Okay. One beer, or a hundred and one, it didn’t really matter at the moment. What mattered was getting the sick kid help. I grabbed my radio and called for an ambulance.
The ambulance showed up a few minutes later and tossed the kid in the back to transport him to the hospital. Since he was only sixteen, and his parents had not yet been located, he was technically my responsibility until I could hand him off to a legal guardian.
Lucky me.
I followed the ambulance and walked into the emergency room with my new temporarily adopted son. They wheeled him into a room, stripped him to check for injuries that were not immediately obvious, then rammed a tube down his throat to pump any remaining contents from his stomach.
“Grab his feet,” said a nurse standing next to me.
“Why?” I asked, unsure why I was being dragged into the medical portion of the show.
“Just do it,” she said.
I complied. It was then that I realized the nurse was holding a catheter tube in her hand big enough to cause a full grown horse to shy away in fear. She was going to insert the tube to empty the kid’s bladder. And I had a front row seat.
I closed my eyes and thought, “Better him than me.”
As I stood there with my eyes closed, holding the kid’s feet, I heard him retch and cough. As the only person in the room not wearing a surgical cap, mask, and scrubs, I was treated to a light shower of God knows what on my head and face. I can still recall the experience today.
Not in a good way.
I asked the nurse if I could let go of his feet. When she said, yes, I walked out to the waiting room and called my dispatcher to find out what was taking them so damn long to find the kid’s parents. I was assured they had been notified and were on their way.
A few minutes before mom and dad arrived to relieve me of babysitting duties, the doctor walked out to the waiting room to talk to me.
“We drew some blood and checked to see how much alcohol he had in him.”
“He was pretty far gone. So how much did he drink?”
“He was 0.005.”
My eyebrows rose. For those unfamiliar with the Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) test, that number is almost non-existent.
“Then what happened to him?”
The doctor told me a small percentage of the population is highly allergic to alcohol and drinking any amount of it is toxic. For those few people, they would be better off drinking drain cleaner rather than booze. It would do less damage.
I thought back to what the kid’s buddies had told me earlier.
“So, he really only had…”
The doctor nodded.
“Yup. About one beer.”
What do you know? They hadn’t been lying to me. It almost restored my faith in humanity.
Almost.
I was still covered in puke, after all.
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