Life is...a Bloody Mess

I've been an EMT now for six months. I earned my license a little over a year ago and in May of last year interviewed for my first ever EMS job. I got it and, needless to say, I was thanking my lucky stars. I have wanted to practice medicine for a while now and this was my first step. It felt like my life, stagnant for twenty-two years, was finally in motion. I was thrilled, terrified, and could hardly sit still. Would I succeed, would I fail, would I realize medicine wasn't the right path for me? Or would I be affirmed? Would I realize there was only on place I truly belonged, one thing I was meant to do?
I don't know if I have answered those questions yet. But I am still here, still working. I am learning something new every day--about the world, about the job, about myself. And I am here to hate it. I don't know if people will read or care, I doubt my words will be helpful for anyone but me. But, I know I need to put my thoughts out there. An I know I want to make something great with those thoughts, and with myself. So, I am here. Let's get talking.

Medicine--What a Cross to Bear

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I-5

On a chilly Sunday evening in mid-January, two young women rolled up to the TransAmerica Title Building on the outskirts of Salem, Oregon, just off Interstate 5, to clean the office. It was their usual Sunday job, though today they had gotten a bit of a late start, having to shower and stop for gas, so they didn't arrive to the business complex until after nine p.m. The office had wide, welcoming windows on every wall and, with the bright florescent lights flipped on, the effect was to create a fishbowl-like scene, the women bustling around in their duties like two busy, little fish. They'd left the door unlocked and entertained themselves by chatting to each other, the two of them best friends. They were Shari Hull, twenty-years-old and the daughter of the owner of the housekeeping company with which they were both employed, and Beth Wilmot, also twenty and a fairly recent transplant to Salem from Spokane, Washington. She'd come for work, and along with steady pay, she...

By the Barrel of a Silver Gun (I-5 Part Two)

In early February of 1981, authorities from Salem flew down the Interstate 5 corridor and assembled with detectives and law officials from northern California and southern Oregon. Each detective had a crime, or two, in their jurisdiction matching a particular modus operandi , and the list of incidents just kept growing. When they gathered, they had no idea the scope of the mystery they were unraveling or just far it was going to reach. It started with a robbery. On December 9, 1980, in Vancouver, Washington, a gas station was held up at gun point, the female attendant left alone in the store. A man entered wearing a brown coat and a fake beard. He demanded cash and brandished a small, silver gun to prove he was serious. The cashier obliged. A few days later, in Eugene, Oregon, on December thirteenth, a Baskin-Robbins was robbed by a man holding a silver gun and wearing a fake beard and a band aid across his nose. In Albany, Oregon, a drive-in was hit on Dec...

Wah Mee Massacre

On a chilly February night, five days after the start of the Chinese New Year, 1983, three young men walked into one of the most renowned, high-stakes gambling dens in the heart of Seattle's Chinatown International District and walked away with thousands of dollars of cash in their pockets and fourteen lives hanging in the balance in their wake. The club was the Wah Mee, a sixty-year-old casino and bar that catered exclusively to Chinese clientele and hosted the highest-stakes illegal gambling in the Pacific Northwest. The men were 22-year-old Kwan Fai "Willie" Mak, 20-year-old Benjamin Ng, and 25-year-old Wai Chiu "Tony" Ng. Willie Mak was born in Kwangtung Province in mainland China and immigrated to the US with his family in 1975 when he was fifteen. By 22, Willie was a high school drop out, working various jobs in and around Seattle, and had a penchant for gambling. He was well-known in the International District gambling clubs, including the Wah Me...

That Bloody Girl

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