Hello, I have been a full-time paramedic for approximately 10 years now. Having been a paramedic for this long I have seen my share of tragic, violent, and heart wrenching human moments. Most of the time things are actually pretty mundane but every so often calls we go on can be quite bizarre. Now, this story that I'm about to tell took place when I was a relatively new medic. So, it was a while ago, but I remember it very clearly due to the particularly unusual nature of this call. I remember way back while I was still in training to become a paramedic the instructors telling us "some things just stick with you, and you have to be ready to accept that". Well I guess this would fit into that category. Although not for the reasons that these instructors were attempting to convey, human tragedy, emotionally taxing situations, or situations that are emotionally hard to cope with. No, in this case the call has stuck with me because it has remained an inexplicable mystery, more than any other call I have had since.
It had been a fairly average shift, not overly busy. I work in a community with a few cities that are in close proximity to one another with a total population around two hundred thousand people. I was working with a veteran medic of 15-20 years experience. He was a solid guy, someone who had been around long enough that the variety of things he had seen had prepared him for nearly anything. A good natured guy and someone who I enjoyed working with a lot.
So, around 10pm that evening we get dispatched for a person who had fallen. Not much more description than that. This is pretty common in EMS, and calls for people who have fallen make up a significant portion of the overall runs done by most EMS services. However, there was an unusual detail from the dispatch center in this case which we received while en route to the scene, and that was that the person who had called 911 stated that they had "seen the person on the floor from outside the house". So, we kinda joked about it on the way to the place saying things like "ha ha wtf, they were looking through people's windows and just happened to see someone stuck on their floor? He is the most heroic peeping tom of all time". Whatever, medics joke, deal with it. Anyway, we get there and there is a police car parked in front of the house, this isn't that unusual, police in our area respond in the capacity of first responders, even occasionally when they are not specifically requested if they happen to be close by. So, I'm supposed to be the lead medic on this particular call, we switch off every other call and it was my turn. I get out and grab our primary medical equipment bag and walk up to the house. It's a fairly suburban home, not that well lit but not an overly creepy place. Just generally a nondescript type of place in a middle-class neighborhood. The building happened to be a one story single family dwelling, white in color, it had a standard front door as you would expect, and then also a sliding patio door a few feet to the left of it. As I walk up I see the police officer who had responded with us, standing to the left of the sliding door with his gun drawn. The sliding door was open but there were blinds obstructing my view of the inside. Now, anyone who is part of EMS knows that generally the police try to secure a situation prior to EMS approaching the scene, but in this instance there was no reason to even assume we needed police on scene. So the lone officer didn't have time to stop us from approaching the situation. So at this point it's me, standing to the left of the police officer with his gun out, and my partner still in the ambulance communicating something unrelated to the dispatch center. I ask the officer what the hell is going on, and he says that there is someone injured inside the house but he thinks there may be someone else in the building who had injured the patient. I was fairly calm at this point but I of course had a lot of questions. So, the officer is crouched down and I'm able to see over the top of him into the house. I see a man laying on his back, on the floor, he is moving around but I didn't get much more detail than that in my first glimpse. My partner walked up behind us and asks me what is going on and I tell him what I know, which at this point was close to nothing and then, simply ask him to go back out to the road to see if he can find the person who had actually called 911.
So, the officer requests back up to his location and he's like, "lets go". He tells me the plan "I'm going to check the building for other people, see if the patient needs anything right away and I'll come back once I make sure the house is empty". Upon walking in, I finally see why the officer had his gun drawn. A couple of relatively unsettling details become immediately apparent as we enter the main room.
First, and perhaps most obvious of these unsettling details was that there was blood everywhere. There is blood on the walls, blood on the carpet, and on the kitchen floor, there was even blood on the ceiling. It looked as if there had been a seriously violent struggle, and for all we knew there had been.
Secondly there was no furniture (with one exception), none, no appliances, no couches, no fixtures, no refrigerator. Obviously there could have been a completely logical explanation for the house to be empty, and for the patient to be there late at night, but it stuck out as unusual.
So, I begin the evaluation of the patient, and this is where things actually start to get really weird. The patient was a male, approximately 40 years old, he was pale in color as if he had lost a lot of blood. He had no visible hair anywhere on his body. He was nearly completely nude but had a pair of shorts around his ankles. This had created a loop with his legs in which a bar stool had become stuck. He was almost completely covered in blood. He had blood around the outside of his mouth, blood dried onto his lips. He had blood under his fingernails. He was bald and had blood smeared over his head. The man, was moving around with minimal purpose, like an animal thrashing that had been caught in a trap. He would not answer any questions. Now, up to this point, the story has been strange, but here is where things enter into a realm where it may start to become hard to believe. It is against federal privacy laws for me to "prove this" but I had to write a real patient care report describing every bit of what follows.
During my evaluation, I start by looking for obvious injuries. I inspect him from head to toe and couldn't see anything obvious. There are no cuts, no stab wounds, I don't see any puncture wounds, and there is no clear location from which all this blood has come from. I tried to look inside of his mouth and I didn't see any blood, but I did note that even his tongue is pale. Since he was already naked it was pretty easy to see that the blood was not likely coming from this person's body.
While thrashing around on the floor the blood covered patient would make animal like grunting and hissing sounds. His pupils were constricted and minimally reactive to light. He would occasionally make intense eye contact with me and then (and this is where it gets truly fucked up) he would attempt to grab my arm and bite me.
Shortly after I finish my initial evaluation of the patient, the back up police that had been requested arrive and come in with their guns out. They had the same questions as everyone else but unfortunately I had no real answers for them. In fact, all I had were more questions.
At nearly the same time, the original police officer who I had entered the building with, comes back into the main room of the small house and says, "nobody else is here, we need to leave". Which at the time I thought was super direct, but the officer looks a bit rattled and so we took him seriously. Looking for any answers at this point I ask the police officer if he found any drugs or medications in the other rooms of the house. I say to him "is it possible there is another person who this man has injured in the house? maybe even an animal? I can't figure out where all this blood is from". The officer just says, "No, but go look in the back bedroom". At this point, we have no name, no explanation, and no witnesses (my partner couldn't find the person who had called 911). So, my partner, who is now inside the building with me, the patient, and three police officers helps the police wrap this guy up in a blanket and strap him onto the stretcher while I walk into the back room.
I get into the back room and similar to the rest of the house it is essentially empty, just a light-bulb in the ceiling and hanging from it something that resembled a misshaped dream-catcher. I had no idea what I was looking at but it did seem important being that it was one of the only objects in the entire building.
So, we get this man loaded into the ambulance and his behavior becomes increasingly aggressive and he makes more attempts to bite me. He has not spoken one word throughout our contact with him. I call to give a radio report to the hospital to try and give them a heads up about what we're bringing them. I try to give as much detail as I can but the hospital staff of course has questions, the same as everyone else, which I can't answer at all. I spend the rest of the ride alone, in the back of a moving vehicle, with this guy attempting to eat me throughout our trip to the hospital.
We get this guy to the hospital, police officers still with us, and transfer care to the staff in the ER at the hospital. We leave and go back into service. We have a few more uneventful calls the rest of the evening. Obviously for the rest of the night my partner and I discussed what we had witnessed and it just increased our curiosity.
At the very end of the shift, around 7 hours later, I walked into the ER (since it was at the same hospital we happened to be working out of). I asked the physician who had treated him if they were able to identify where the blood had come from and he said no. He stated that he was completely free of any known toxins (drugs, legal or illicit) and that his blood tests came back within normal limits. So, they literally found nothing wrong with him of all the things that they checked, and they couldn't even confirm that the blood he was covered in was his own. So, the doctor says, "they are just getting ready to discharge him now". I of course was surprised to hear that he was going to be able to leave and I couldn't believe that they found no medical explanation as to what had happened to him. As I was finishing my conversation with the physician I see the man exit the room we had dropped him off in, now dressed in an expensive looking suit. He was still fairly pale but they had cleaned all the blood off of him. He didn't appear to recognize me and just walked past like nothing at all had happened, out the main emergency room doors. Nobody from the ER could tell me who the person was who had dropped off the suit for him (since we dropped him off naked and in a blanket). I thought it might have been the person who had originally called 911 whom we never found or identified. Police said that they were not going to trace the number since technically the call was legitimate, and that there was no apparent crime committed. Seriously questionable situations and extreme curiosity apparently don't equal the right to go question people via reverse phone number lookups.
There were no reports of missing people or animals following the event. None of the people involved in the situation ever found any real explanation as to what the hell had taken place. I have been in many strange situations, some rivaling this in how unsettling they were, but none of them have been so mysterious as this.
I would love it if someone knew about non-circular dream-catchers or had any theories regarding what happened to this man. Since this happened we only occasionally bring it up, generally saying silly things like "remember that time we met a zombie?". Thinking too hard about it is just frustrating and so we joke.
Thank you very much for reading.
I.P.
Submitted September 13, 2015 at 12:03PM by IcurusPrime http://ift.tt/1K4ZtRR nosleep
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