While I was answering the phone, a person knocked on the door looking for Chris, who was in the shower. Another friend dropped by so I hung up the phone. As she left, the first person told me his woes and showed me his bleeding foot. I got ready to deal with it myself when I remembered that he is HIV+. Back to the drawing board. Three butterfly strips, some hydrogen peroxide, a sterile bandage or two, and a pep talk later, I drove him home with explicit instructions for home care and follow up. Tomorrow I invest in some rubber gloves so that I will be prepared for such events in the future and also promise myself to look up the protocol on dealing with potential biohazards. I also make a note to remember that this fellow prefers whole milk and drinks a gallon every three days. (because part of what was stressing him out was his concern that his diet has been lousy lately partly because he finds it difficult to transport a gallon of milk when the weather gets too warm and a whole host of other reasons that also involve the lousy health care system and his being overwhelmed with his lack of knowledge of where to go when he has a concern and maybe you can get the drift of how challenging it might have been to convince him that he could care for this wound himself and how my not having rubber gloves at my home was tantamount to the trouble with what happened at the twin towers except multiply that by seven or eight and you have what is wrong with our country)
It's days like these that remind me that I believe in personalism and that's what makes me a Catholic Worker (which is just another way of saying that I believe that my faith is dead without works). I don't really care in whose name you do the right thing; I mostly care that you just do it. And if you choose not to, I don't really care that much either. Just leave me alone to do what I believe is right, and keep your negativity to yourself.
