Restraints

Terminal cancer. As I watched the man, stomach seizing for oxygen, in the final throes of death, I wondered what was going through his head, if anything at all. The beeping of his O2 meter was erratic at best. Alarms were going off on several machines that were hooked in to him. I was distracted by his eyes, so sunken it was as if they shouldn't be there anyway. When I stepped into the room, they went wide as he stared into my very soul. What was it that he was trying to say to me as he twitched in his bed? The nurses were holding him down, but there was a pronounced motion as he tried to get to me, eyes wide with an unrecognizable emotion.

Two officers and the two nurses gathered around the bed to slip him into an orange jumpsuit. His writhing motions increased, but only briefly as the man quickly ran out of energy. His head rolled about his shoulders aimlessly in bursts. Whenever a new person walked into the room, no matter how brief their stay, his eyes would lock on, almost jumping out of the sockets, then he'd return to his nearly comatose state.

The ambulance arrived, taking an extended amount of time due to security constraints. The EMT's were soon escorted inside with their stretcher and equipment.

I approached the inmate, handcuffs in hand. As if in slow motion, the man's movement stopped, all movement, except for those glazed, yellow eyes. They slowly and surely zoned in on the handcuffs. His mouth opened in protest, all but two of his teeth missing due to past heavy meth use. He cried out with an inhuman, feral snarl, bits of mucous and vomit escaping every open orifice in his face. He tried to escape, tried to roll off of the bed, seized up, pulling his hands away from my own. Beads of sweat formed on his brow. He couldn't fight for long as fatigue would surely take over.

I grasped his clammy, cold wrist, and tightened the cuff, double locked it, and moved on to the second. Before I knew it, it was over. The nurses and EMT's placed his small, shriveled body onto the stretcher and wheeled him out.

The nurses cracked jokes.