I don’t like to bug you guys too close together, but I had to get this off my chest. Between the shootings in Texas yesterday and UNLV today, it’s just another nightmare on nightmare.

This is an essay I’ve been working on. About the time a gunman came into my place of work. It was catharsis for me. Maybe it can be that for you too.

The Almost

It was Tuesday, or Wednesday. I tried to look up the date and couldn’t find it, but it doesn’t really matter now. The important thing is, it was my on-call day. I had the phone, which meant that, if any of the doctors downstairs in primary care had a patient with psychological concerns, I was the one getting a panicked phone call.

“They said they’re suicidal,” they’d whisper, or “I think they have PTSD? What do I do?”

In case you missed it, most doctors are not trained in psychology. That’s where my team came in.

“Hold on,” I said calmly, “I’ll be right there.” I left most of my stuff in the office—I’d be back in a second—and just took the on-call phone. Later, I’d kick myself for not grabbing my personal cell, but in this moment, I was just feeling tired. My days as a primary care psychologist were starting to wear thin.

At least this guy was in for a PTSD assessment. PTSD was my strong point, something I really enjoyed working with. Maybe we could do some exposure therapy together, get him living a normal life again. Or maybe he’d tick all the “no” boxes and I’d never see him again. That was always the gamble.

Our clinics were color-coded and occupied half of the main floor of the hospital. The other half was the atrium, mostly walkways and benches. I found my way about halfway down, to Red clinic, and called my patient’s name, looking out for an unknown man.

He was a tall, lean Black man in a bright red sweatshirt that matched the clinic. He seemed a little skittish when we shook hands, but he smiled back at me. That was a good start.

This part of my memory fuzzes over. Did I say something else? Why hadn’t we moved yet? I only remember that, from my right, I heard someone scream, “He has a rifle! He has a rifle!”

A rifle. Not a gun. This was a VA hospital after all. The patients and most of the staff were familiar with the different kinds of guns. This one was a rifle.

He has a rifle. The words pulsated through the atrium and the thick, matted crowd shattered apart, like a school of fish dissolving, like a building crumbling. Some nights, I still think on that image, when the rest of my memory fails me.

People began to scream.

And to run.

I never saw the gunman. I know now that he was about forty feet away from me, but at the time, my brain kicked into gear and spit out two objectives: get out, get my patient out.

I grabbed my new PTSD patient—yeah, he was never coming back—by the sleeve and we walked briskly towards the entrance. Oh, it was close, maybe twenty, thirty feet away, but it was as though someone had stretched out the space between me and the corner where I’d turn to go outside.

As I shuffled along, with my patient in one arm, I used my other arm to grab people, to shout in a measured voice, “You have to leave. We have to leave,” while I pulled them towards the main entrance. A lot of people were running, shoving past patients and staff alike towards the outer doors, but I continued my painfully slow march, reorienting people towards the doors as I went.

Where was the gunman? Coming? I didn’t know. Couldn’t know that, in those first sixty seconds, he’d been tackled and neutralized by VA police.

All I knew is that I needed to get people out.

The corner! The corner at last! I follow the throng and crush of people out into the vestibule and I was there, almost outside, when we passed an older Black man with tufts of fluffy white hair, sitting with his blind cane on the bench in the vestibule.

There had been no code called. No alert. He was just sitting there, while people raced by him.

“Sir!” I called. “I’m going to take your arm. Sir, there’s a gunman. We have to get outside.”

In a pleasant, unhurried manner, he creaked to his feet. Now I had him in one hand, my patient in the other, and we headed towards the main circular drive. I could see cars. I could see people racing across the street towards the UIC medical campus.

But we were moving slowly, so slowly, and suddenly the blind man stopped and said, “Wait, wait, my pants are falling down!”

I kept thinking that this would have been comical in any other situation, me slowly, slowly walking the patients across the drive while the blind man hiked up his pants over his underwear with both his hands. Me and my patient blocked cars so the blind man could cross, and then the three of us made our way to UIC, to safety.

It’s when I tried to remember my parents’ phone numbers that I started to break down. It was then that my body remembered to be scared. I could barely type out the numbers. But I wasn’t scared, not yet. I was vibrating. Fizzing. Numb.

I tried my best friend first, I don’t know why, and I fucked up her number, got someone else, apologized for bothering them.

I called mom. No answer. Typical; she never answers her phone.

I tried dad. In a calm voice: “Hey? Dad. Don’t panic. I’m okay.”

A parents’ worst nightmare, and he had no idea, because there was no news coverage, nothing but a tweet or two from people inside.

Not much happened after that. I ran into a friend who’d also evacuated and we waited, watched the nonexistent news, and settled in for a four-hour stint while the building was searched top to bottom. Eventually, we were all let in to get out belongings and go home.

The details would come out piecemeal in the next few days.

That the man had shot up the side of our building in pursuit of another man before running into the hospital.

That the VA police who had just happened to be rounding had tackled him within sixty seconds of entry.

That he had been on the CCTV minutes before, while I was safe in my office, and no one had called a code.

After that, everyone talked about how prepared we were.

That’s not what I heard. I heard “lucky.”

Later that year or the next, my cousin would be inside Marjorie Stoneman Douglas. It would be a media storm.

For us, there was only minimal news coverage. No one had died. No one had been shot. The news was hungry for blood, and we could give them nothing.

At the end of it all, it was just another day in America.

An “almost.”

We notice the tragedies. We collect the tragedies like stamps or coins.

But sometimes I wonder how many “almosts” happen every day.

And why we’re so ready to dismiss these “almosts”, these quiet violations of psychological safety, as nothings.

Updates

Not much to share since my last missive. I just wanted to thank you for reading. Hopefully it provokes thought. Hopefully you get something out of it. Hopefully some day, we’ll live in a world without guns.

Hopefully.

Check out Everytown for Gun Safety for actions you can take.