How Long Will I Cry? (21 page)

And the sad part is they don’t have resources
in the community to help them. It’s like the system is designed for
them to fail. Now that I work and serve as a youth organizer,
there’s times where I’m talking to these kids and I want to learn
more about them. So I go to the parents—and the parents know less
than what I know. And it’s not that they don’t care; it’s that they
don’t know
how
to care. These kids are out there and they’re
just learning based on what’s in the environment.

On the West Side, they run a drug deal right
in front of our youth center, on the corner of the unit. And I have
to talk them, like, “Hey, I know this is what you guys have to do,
and I’m not telling you not to do it. But while we’re meeting,
maybe you could move it.”

And they respect it. They do. I give it up to
these drug dealers because—it’s horrible—I feel like they’re
destroying the community and, at the same time, they sorta save it
in some weird ways.

It’s like they’re destroying these people
that are already addicted or heading down that path but then
providing resources for these people that can’t make it otherwise.
That’s what got my mom through. There were some times where we
would have an uncle come through and be like, “Here’s $100.”

Honestly, I feel like the older guys don’t
want these kids out there drug dealing. They don’t. They’ll tell
them, “Here’s $20, man. Stay off these streets. Go do something.”
But when it comes to the gang thing, they need their numbers. They
need their recruitment to be high. That’s the only way they keep
themselves safe.

These kids, they’re not ready for it. They’re
recruited at a young age by gangs. They paint this cool image of
like, “Man, you could be like us and we’ll protect you.” That’s how
they got this boy named Cornelio,50 who was just killed this past
year.51 Cornelio, when I started working with him, he was 13. He
was a tough kid, just this heart, and that’s what they look for:
that true, true heart. And Cornelio, they wanted him and they got
him and he’s dead. And that’s how it works.

The police can’t do much unless they have an
actual incident that took place and they have the proof right
there. As community members, we know what happened and who did
what. But it’s all hearsay. So these cops can’t do anything with
that information. Now, what I don’t respect about the police
officers is that you see these guys on the corner and you know
they’re up to no good, so you pull over. But instead of telling
them to disperse, you sit there holding a conversation with them,
get back in your cop car, and roll off. That’s what I don’t
respect. I’m not going to say all officers do that. I see it a lot,
though. They have to maintain a good relationship with the
gangbangers. They want peace on their clock.

My kids will argue that these cops are
extremely crooked and in on all of this. So for these young people,
it’s like going against joint forces. You’re fighting against
people in the community and you’re fighting against cops and you’re
fighting against family members—because for a lot of my kids, just
like for myself, family’s tied into this. So they don’t want to
cause controversy with family. They learn to dismiss certain things
and just hope to try and be a little different than everybody
else.

My biggest thing for these kids is exposure.
Take them outside these communities. I take them to places that
normal people would be like, “Oh, that’s regular.” But take these
kids to a theater or a restaurant, they’re like, “Oh my goodness,
this place looks expensive.” And it probably wasn’t, but to them
it’s like, “Oh, we’re downtown! We’re eating downtown!” They make
the biggest thing out of the smallest thing.

We take them on college trips, because they
need to see other students such as themselves that came out of the
neighborhood. They’re in school, they’re successful, and they’re
doing something major—as opposed to seeing their friends that are
on the block pretty much the whole day.

I’ve thought about leaving Chicago myself. I
thought about going to somewhere warm, like Miami. Oh my God, I
visited Miami and it’s just like, they hold on to that Hispanic
culture. They all speak Spanish. It’s something we lost here in
Chicago.

I wanted to leave after undergrad. But my
family acted like I killed somebody. I realized I could never
leave.
La familia
—you know it’s all about the family. We’re
all we got. Period. My mom says it and my brother says it. He even
has it tattooed on him. We are all that we have, so to lose a piece
is like breaking down a significant part of your backbone. There’s
no way you can function without it. If one person out of the family
makes it and wants to achieve more, they’re bound by the ties that
they have to their family. So everything about me is just tainted.
It’s like choosing between where my heart is and what’s right—and
it’s hard to make that choice.

—
Interviewed by Danielle Killgore

Endnotes

49 The phrase describes someone from the
older generation of Latin Kings.

50 According to the Chicago Police
Department, Cornelio Farfan Jr. was killed on Dec. 5, 2010. See
https://portal.chicagopolice.org/.../60502397208980E5E040A5A7403B2187
.

51 Our interview took place early in
2011.

What’s One Bullet?

ERNIE PURNELL

Ernie Purnell is a nurse in the Cook County
Trauma Unit at the John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital, located at Ogden
and Harrison on Chicago’s West Side. Formerly known as Cook County
Hospital, Stroger is a central hub for violence-related treatment
in the city, and much of its patient population is economically
challenged and without medical insurance.

Purnell is a tall, stocky 47-year-old who
grew up in an impoverished African-American neighborhood on the
West Side. His beard has a little gray and he wears glasses.
Despite the difficult nature of his work, he is jovial and often
laughs in amazement at what he has to deal with every day.

One of the favorite questions that my younger
patients ask is, “What type of gun did I get shot with?”

And I answer, “I don’t know. I just know you
have a hole in you. We’re going to assume a
big
gun because
the hole in you sure is big!”

They’re like, “Oh, did you get the bullet
out?”

“Well, I don’t know, we’ll have to see.” And
one of the things I like is showing them the X-ray. It’s like,
“Okay, guess what that is! That’s the bullet that’s still inside of
you!”

And they gasp and are like, “Are you going to
get it out?”

“Mmmm, depends…”

When a young person comes in, we have to
physically take care of them. So we need to figure out what’s wrong
and treat them. Because the goal is to save lives. So number one:
Save their life, regardless of what happened before. You’re here,
you’re a patient at Stroger Hospital, we just need to deal with
this. We start an IV, draw blood for labs, get that X-ray, maybe a
CAT scan, give them medications for pain, a contrast to light up
their insides so that we can see what’s going on. And then, we prep
‘em depending on where they’re going.

After we break through saving lives, the
second step is getting past those trust barriers. A lot of our
patients
don’t
want to tell us what happened, who they are,
what’s going on, or their medical history—and those are really,
really important things that we need to know about while treating
them. They may not
want
any treatment. They may think like,
“Okay, you’re just holding me here until the police get here.” And
it’s like, “No, not really.” Or, “You’re going to finish me off.”
Which is not true, but sometimes you have to deal with those types
of attitudes. Or, “You’re holding me until the
other
person
can get here to finish me off.”

Sometimes there’s the one who walks out, or
the one who gets really angry at the staff—but you can tell that
anger is not really with
us
. It’s the situation, and you’re
trying to get them to understand that. It can be kind of a rough
transition until they realize that we just want to save their life.
And we talk to them
always
within the confines of the
trust—because once you lose trust, that’s it.

For young adults, the reason they wind up in
the emergency room is usually gang-slash-crime-related. I won’t say
everybody’s in a gang, but a gang-related crime is usually the
background of what’s going on. You kinda want them to understand
how serious it is, because a lot of our young people, they see
these things on TV—people get shot and get up all the time, and
then, in the next scene, they’re okay. They have this idea that, “I
can get shot four or five times and then
live,
so what’s one
bullet?” And then, when you tell them that one bullet didn’t just
go through you—it bounced, it ricocheted around inside of you, so
it hit a lot of things—they’re like, “What? Bullets can do that?”
Uh, yeah. It’s not like TV or a video game—at all. You don’t get up
again.

They don’t realize that one bullet can cause
massive damage to the human body. I like to bring them to the
reality of it: “Okay, we took out part of your bowel. The bowel is
responsible for digestion, which means that you may have to change
your diet, particularly if we gave you a colostomy bag. You’re
going to have to learn what to do in social situations, because you
can’t eat everything that you want to eat.” Or they had to take out
a kidney, and then I explain what a kidney does. Or they had to
take out a part of your liver, and I explain what a liver does. Or
they had to take out a part of your lung, and I explain what the
lung does. And it’s like, “You’re only 16. These are not parts that
you should be missing at this time.” And, unfortunately, sometimes
you have to explain to them, “If your spinal cord’s been
transected, that’s game over for your legs. I’m sorry.” Or they’ll
ask, “Will I be able to have sex or have children?” That all
depends because sometimes you lose your testicles, so that’s
no
. They don’t like that part. But those are the
consequences of your decisions, you know. You went out there, you
got shot. Unfortunately, this time it took out your scrotum, so
it’s a done deal.

And a lot of patients, when they find out
that they’ve lost certain body parts, or when you have a patient
who becomes quadriplegic or paraplegic, the support system that he
thought he had—including his friends or his girlfriend—they tend to
drift away before his hospital stay is actually over. And so he’s
forced to re-evaluate those relationships. And, usually, he’ll draw
closer to the ones who
truly
love him, which are the ones
who are really actually visiting him—usually a grandparent or
parent, aunt, uncle. It makes him think. Sitting in the hospital
bed, the only thing you can do is think. Because you can’t run the
streets, you can’t go with your friends, you can’t do too much of
anything, so you need to re-evaluate what brought you here to the
hospital.

Our whole trauma team deals with the
families. The doc may have to go out and explain what’s going on
with the patient. And I may have to play liaison between them and
the patient, because the families want to see their loved one—and,
depending on what’s going on, they can’t come in just yet. My job
is to try and get them in, you know, and at least
see
the
patient—maybe just see them on their way to surgery. At least you
saw them—‘cause there is the chance that this may be the last time
you have to say whatever you’re gonna say, do whatever you’re gonna
do with that person. And that’s both ways. It’s both ways.

We have met the parents who, you know,
they’re tired. They’re like, “I have talked to him or her over and
over and over and over again, and she just keeps doing X, Y and Z.
I don’t understand. Why am I not reaching my child?” They want us
to talk to their children—sometimes the child just needs to hear it
from someone else. And then, you know, it’s like, “Well, you need
to listen to your parents, because they kinda know what they’re
talking about.” We try to encourage the parents: “Don’t give up on
them—‘cause the teen years, they’re just the crazy years. This is
when you have to hold on a little bit tighter.”

And then you have some people where it’s
like, “Yikes, your parents are nightmares!” You can see it in some
of the things they say, some of the things they do, and some of the
ways they appear when they come in to check on their child. It’s
like, really? Drunk? High? These are not good things. These are not
good role models. One parent was like, “Don’t worry about him. He’s
just gonna die anyway.” And I’m like, “You do realize he’s only
15?”

So you want to tell the child, “Until you get
away from your parents, I can’t see you changing, because they’re
the major influence in your life and they’re leading you way down
the wrong path.”

You will sometimes get the victim and the
assailant at the same time, and the best thing to do is to try and
keep them as separate and as far away from each other as possible.
Because it’s not them. They’re injured, so they’re not going to do
anything to harm each other anymore. It’s the families—and when the
families get here, that’s when things blow up.

Of course, everyone’s innocent because,
regardless of who the victim is, the family is always going to
provide support. If they’re the assailant, then the family will
usually buy into the idea that the other victim must have done
something to
trigger
the assailant to attack. If they’re the
victim, then the assailant must have attacked the victim for no
reason. They never get down to the reasons of what really happened.
So yeah, things have blown up here to full-fledged fights where we
actually do have to call in the police and people do have to get
arrested.