The sun is going down behind the horizon, thick clouds overhead. I can feel the first drops of rain.
My knees, my back are screaming in pain, but I can't move, I have to hold my patient's head still.
Blood runs from his head pooling beneath my boots mixing with the puddles from that afternoons rain. The blood is red but as twilight approaches it gets darker in colour before fading to a sticky black.
Beneath my hands the patient twitches, I wonder if it is because he is cold and drunk or if it is because of a serious head injury.
Not for the first time I wish for eyes that could peer into his skull to see the damage. Instead I stare at his face, his eyes closed only sometimes opening to my shouts of his name.
We enlist the help of bystanders to help roll his body onto the stretcher. We bind him to it using straps that were designed for other equipment.
We make do and mend.
Finally he is in the ambulance, on the stretcher he holds his arms in a position that I hope means that his brain is largely undamaged.
We head for the hospital, lights and sirens blazing, weaving through traffic. I keep looking at him, checking and rechecking to make sure that he hasn't taken a turn for the worse. I hold my breath that he doesn't start fitting.
At the hospital the resuscitation room is a place of noise and light, full of doctors and nurses and radiographers, all in lead aprons. They listen to me tell the story of the last hour of this man's life. Numbers roll from my mouth, the mechanism of the injury, my findings and things that I didn't find. They hear me hope that it is the alcohol causing this.
We go back to the ambulance, in the center of the floor is a perfect bootprint.
Mine.
Formed from his blood.
