‘Don’t Suck My Blood,’ Boy Pleads
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

My partner, Bronson, and I get a call for a “ped struck”- a pedestrian struck by a moving vehicle – in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn.
I jump out to see what we’ve got. An Asian boy, about 11, is lying face up on the ground, turning his head repeatedly left and right. Bystanders tell me he was hit by a car. A bike lies a few feet away. I stabilize his head and tell Bronson to get the longboard, the device we’ll strap him onto to protect his spinal column – standard protocol for a ped struck.
“My, aren’t we bossy,” Bronson says in a huff. He’s annoyed because we’ll have to take the patient to Lutheran, a Trauma One center, and not Maimonides, where Rachel, the beautiful triage nurse he’s in love with, works.
Bystanders point to a car. Inside, a disheveled man behind the wheel slurs, “Kid came outta nowhere.” A cop gets out a Breathalyzer and some handcuffs.
Hovering over me is the boy’s mother, a tiny Asian woman who shouts in Chinese to a boy of about 6, apparently her younger son.
He translates to me that his older brother was riding his bike, “crossing on the green, not in between,” when the car hit him. No, he wasn’t wearing a helmet. Yes, his head hit the ground. The mother throws an occasional English word into her hysterical Chinese, only confusing things more.
Back on the asphalt, tears are leaking out of the corners of the boy’s eyes. I ask, “Do you speak English?”
He cries, “I don’t want to die!”
“Sweetheart,” I soothe him, “calm down. You’re not gonna die. Did you pass out?”
He blinks.
“Did everything go black?”
“No.”
“Does this hurt?” I press the back of his neck gingerly with my fingers before placing the cervical collar.
He closes his eyes. “No.” Then he opens them. His pupils are equal and reactive to light, and he’s not slurring his speech or vomiting – these would be classic signs of a head injury, but from what I can see, he’s okay. But I’m going to board and collar him anyway.
“I don’t want to go to the hospital!” he wails.
“Why not?” I say, trying to calm him.
“They’ll make you better.”
“They’re going to suck my blood!” I don’t know if hospitals in China are terrible places, if it’s village lore that doctors in Western hospitals suck your blood, or what, so I try to calm him some more as Bronson comes back with the longboard.
“No needles!” the boy cries.
“No needles,” I say, as we logroll him onto the board and fasten the straps. His mother speaks to him agitatedly in Chinese, then says to him, in a broken English apparently for our benefit, “Hospital good place.”
We hoist the immobilized boy onto the stretcher and load him into the ambulance. Inside, he asks, “Am I going to die?”
I tell the little brother to ask his mother if the boy has any medical problems. “No.”
“Any psychiatric problems?”
The mother speaks right to me. “He very hyper.” Bronson raises his eyebrows at her sudden vocabulary. Clearly, her son has been evaluated, probably by a school psychologist.
En route to the hospital, he starts in again. “You’re going to suck my blood!” I repeat, “Sweetheart, nobody’s going to suck your blood.” Maybe in China they use leeches? “You’re going to be fine. You’re not hurt.”
It’s all I can do to keep him calm while the mother keeps up a constant stream of staccato Chinese. “Ma’am,” I say indirectly, by way of the little translator. “Please calm down.”
The little brother doesn’t translate that. Instead, he says something in Chinese directly to his older brother, which shuts him up.
I ask, “What did you say?” Before he can answer, the mother suddenly smacks the older boy on the forehead, just above the immobilization collar, and shrieks at him in Chinese. I shield the boy’s face. “Ma’am, please don’t smack him in the head.”
She shouts at him in English, “Ambulance say you no hurt! Ambulance say shut up!”
Rather than being comforted, the boy’s eyes leak tears again as he stares up at the ceiling lights. Petrified, his voice quavers. “Just please don’t suck my blood.”
Ms. Klopsis is an emergency medical technician for the FDNY. This column details her observations and experiences on the job. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of patients.