Incident on the Platform

This afternoon, after volunteering at HMI in the morning and enjoying a lunch of nachos with Cynthia, I arrived on the subway platform at Union Square to witness a disturbing incident. A young man, probably around 30, went into convulsions at the very edge of the platform. He fell over, whacking his head hard against the concrete, and would have rolled onto the tracks if other passengers hadn't grabbed him and pulled him to safety. (He still was not all that far from the edge, though).

Apparently he cut himself when he fell because he was bleeding from somewhere on his head. A few people went upstairs in search of help and came down saying help was on the way. But I didn't see anything. I went upstairs, called 911, and reported the incident to EMS, in hopes they would send an ambulance. I came back to the platform to find one man with a police badge and a walkie talkie hovering over the unconscious man, speaking into it. Then another man in a sort of Transit Authority vest came over and they prevented him from rolling onto the tracks as he tried to turn over (but still not moving him more than a foot or two from the edge).

Meanwhile, probably about 15 minutes had passed and I didn't see any evidence of an amublance. Two more policemen came down, looked the man over, but didn't really do much of anything.

I had to wonder what this unfortunate fellow's chances of survival would have been if he had been dying. Probably not much better than the proverbial snowball in hell. As it was, he might have a concussion or some kind of bleeding on the brain, and precious moments were being lost.

Finally I boarded the train and went home. It's discouraging and disheartening to see how slow the response to this incident was, given that we were only a few minutes away from several hospitals. Someone should have been down there actually doing something for this guy a lot quicker. All I can say is, don't get sick on the subway, darlin'. You may not survive.