#febuwhump adjacent
OK, so I haven’t been able to make myself write anything on hypothermia, and none of the alt prompts are grabbing me, so you get a true story. Fair warning, it doesn’t have a happy ending. (This is one reason I much prefer fiction.)
TW/CW: RL death (not graphic), drug use mention
So, you may remember that this past summer, I came across a dead body in a lake. Definitely a first for me. Before 2021, I’d never seen a deceased person outside of a funeral home.
So it was weird when it happened again, seven months later.
This was in late December. I was in my kitchen early one morning, making tea, and I gradually became aware of flashing blue and red lights outside my house. I peeked through the curtains to see what was out there.
Answer: several police cars and an ambulance. I was alarmed to see a lot of cops walking around my next-door neighbor’s yard. (Next door neighbors are a nice Ukrainian couple and their kids.)
A couple of paramedics wheeled a stretcher between my house and theirs, behind a hedge. I waited anxiously. When they came out, the guy on the stretcher was no one I recognized. Definitely not a neighbor. He appeared to be wearing a pair of undershorts and nothing else.
Remember, I said this was in late December. The temperature outside was near freezing.
Did you know some ambulances carry a portable machine that does chest compressions? I’d never seen one before. A handy device; I’m sure it saves wear and tear on your paramedics. The machine steadily thumped away as they loaded the stretcher into the ambulance. Eventually the ambulance left, but not quickly, and not with sirens. After a while, the cops also departed.
Later that day, I saw Ukrainian Mom in her yard talking to Nice Retired Guy who lives in the house on the other side of her. Of course I had to join them.
It turned out, Ukrainian Mom had gone outside that morning with their dog (a gorgeous Samoyed, naturally) and she’d found the guy lying on the ground between my house and hers. No one she recognized either. Somewhat scandalized, she told me that a pair of pants had been hanging on my fence, before the cops collected them. I noted that it’s a known phenomenon in late-stage hypothermia for a person to start taking clothes off. It’s called “paradoxical undressing.”
A few days later, I heard through unofficial channels that the guy was declared dead at the hospital. The cops knew him as a frequent drug user, and the most likely scenario was that he’d been in an altered mental state and just wandered off into the night. There’s a small suburban nature preserve behind my house, so he might have gotten lost in the woods. Still, there are houses all around it. It should have been easy to find help, if he’d ever been in a state to realize he needed help.
Just a strange, sad case. And weird that I encountered two victims of death by misadventure in one year.
