One from the slum
I work in a pretty grim part of town. To the right of my office is a run down housing estate, to the left a school for screaming kids who stab each other with alarming regularity. Most of the housing is post WWII and the few shops that haven’t closed get held up by local kids who’ve graduated from knives to guns.
I was walking into work this morning and even though I was late the weather was so overcast it seemed like it was still before dawn. Earlier, it had been raining heavily and I was sploshing through the puddles as I listened to my mp3 player. I realised I wouldn’t be happier anywhere else. I grew up in neighbourhoods like the one where I now work and I’ve never experienced a threat I couldn’t deal with. I know that sounds kind of cocky, but I don’t believe a person should live in fear just because they’re not 6′ 2 and weigh 13 stone.
I recently read that when a person gets stabbed or shot, they don’t die from the wound itself or losing blood, but the shock of the event. Can anyone confirm this? If it is true, I suggest that if we expect to be shot or stabbed at all times, when (if) it happens we’ll be fine.
10 Responses
Oli says...
OK, so that’s why you stabbed yourself in the hand a few months back? It all makes sense.
Kim says...
That avocado was coming right at me, something had to be done. I just didn’t mean to impale it to my hand.
Matt says...
Bullets usually shock a person to death; knives usually cause a person to bleed to death.
http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/425/425lect12.htm
To be safe, try to avoid particularly vicious looking avacados.
Kim says...
Thanks for sorting that point out, it really interests me. I will watch those avocados, too.
Do you remember when we used to go swimming by my work and the pub we’d go to afterward?
Matt says...
That charming little pub where the locals greeted each other by chewing off each others ears and eating their children? Can’t wait to get back!
Simon says...
Surely it depends where you get shot. I don’t mean like outside the grocers but I think a bullet in the head (I won’t tidy my bedroom) might overide shock as the cause of death.
Just a thought.
Mickey says...
Agreed. I feel a shot to the hand might mess up your operational capacity, but I doub’t that alone would kill you. I also feel a shot to the hand would not cause that much shock. It might even just make you go ‘ooh’. A shot to the head or neck or spine would kill you before shock set in however. I know my firearms training would come in useful one day.
Kim says...
Mickey, I’ll be calling you when the apocalypse happens.
Oli says...
I think the noise you make when you get shot says quite a lot about your personality. Personally I’m hoping that I don’t go ‘ooh’, in favour of some kind of butch grunting noise. I’m not sure that’s very realistic though.
Actually, being british I’d probably apologise while I figured out what was happening, then would have missed the moment for some cutting remark.
Kim says...
I swear TV teaches us we have to say something sharp (or witty if you’re British) when you are dying or about to die.
I think I’m going to break with tradition and go for ’so long suckers!’ before I escape to either the hospital, or the afterlife.