Saturday, December 6, 2008

Doctor Death

About ten years ago at Air Traffic Control school my class was having lunch, with everyone getting to know each other. I remember a classmate ask me; "So tell me about you Chiles, what have you been up to before this?" I told them a bit about myself, as well as a story about some of my driving adventures. After I was done, he just said; "Jeez, so your name isn't David, it's Doctor Death!"

I really have no idea why, but for some reason over the past twenty odd years I have seen a lot of situations, collisions mostly, in which people have died. And when I say this, I don't mean I happen to drive by just after the emergency vehicles get there and start rescuing people and cleaning up. Usually the collision occors directly in front of me, or that I arrive at the scene within seconds.

Generally I am the person who dials 911 to get the emergency services rolling, and I cant count the times I have had to sit in the back of a cruiser to write out a statement for the police. I have been called to court to testify on a few occasions, and have testified in a criminal trial against a driver who was eventually found guilty of Dangerous Driving (cause death), which resulted in a four year prison term.

In my van I have fire extinguisher number 6 mounted just inside the driver side sliding door, with number 7 ziptied under the passenger seat. That means I have used numbers 1 through 5 putting out the various car fires that I happened to come across.

I have seen things that have made me cry, made me laugh, and made me shake my head in amazement. I have also turned away from the aftermath of a collision puking my guts out, been blessed, been assaulted, been thanked, been yelled at, and even helped a cop out who decided to puke his guts out just after me.

I have seen near miraculous situations where people survived what seemed unsurvivable collisions, and seen people die for hardly any reason whatsoever.

In all of these situations, however, I have been watched by a man; a man who sometimes does his job and takes life away with him, and for whatever reason, at other times, hangs back with the few onlookers who have arrived, just to watch and leave emptyhanded.

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