blood and bikes

okay, so the freakiest thing just happened to me.

i just got done eating lunch at wright and was walking back when i saw rachel walking in the opposite direction. so we stood and talked for a few minutes, mostly about the bodies exhibition in indy this weekend and how i'm totally freaked out by seeing real human cadavers for the first time ever. so we say goodbye and as i'm walking toward the steps--which, if you're not familiar with the campus, is probably a good seven feet from the top step to the bottom--a guy on a bike comes down the steps. at first i thought it was just a stupid frat boy trying to be a hardass, but i was terribly mistaken. it was a homeless guy, and on his way down, he hit his head on the metal guardrail and probably half the concrete steps and landed on his back at the bottom with his bike a good six feet away.

i was the only person who saw this entire thing go down. naturally, i start to freak out.

of course, i asked him if he was okay (in hindsight, that's a stupid question since the man is CLEARLY in pain, but what else are you supposed to say? "excuse me, sir, are you still breathing?") and he said he was fine, though he clearly wasn't. by this point, a couple other people (including rachel) had come by and a girl asked if any of us should call someone, and he insisted that we not call anyone because if we called the police he'd go to jail.

yes. if we call the police, he will go to jail. i don't know the conditions of this statement, and i'm probably better off not knowing.

so i offer to help him up, but i'm really afraid to touch him very much because i have NO idea if he's bleeding. so he gets up and his mouth is bleeding, and then he starts SPITTING blood. a lot of it. on the ground. so we're all telling him he really needs to go to the hospital, but he keeps telling us that he's had 23 broken bones and he was in the marines and he's been homeless for four years and if we call the cops, he's going to jail. so we're freaking out, but not calling the cops.

so he stands up and wants to know where his hat is, and i pick it up and hand it to him. then he asks where his bike is, and it's RIGHT next to him, so i'm 95% sure he has a concussion, because he's pretty well disoriented. so he has some girl take him in the direction he wanted to go, and rachel and i decide to run into the education building to tell someone.

so when we get in there, the people in the office don't know what to do, and they're like "well, we'll call someone, but i don't really know who to call." seriously? i'm a sophomore in college, i am not responsible enough to know what to do in this situation when it just springs itself on me, and they are PAID to know what to do in this situation. you'd think they could do something.

so by the time we make it back outside, the guy is gone but another girl who was there is standing outside on the phone and we tell her we talked to someone in there, but we don't know what they're going to do. so we have no idea what happened to this homeless guy or what we were supposed to do, but it was seriously one of the scariest things i've experienced in my life.