Frozen Innocence
I found him standing on the side of the road, wet and shivering in the middle of winter, his skin deathly white and tinged with blue. Whoever the boy was, he was in trouble.
“Hey buddy, are you okay?” I said to him. I realized how stupid the question sounded after it had come out of my mouth, but he didn’t even seem to register I was there.
The boy was young, couldn’t have even been ten years old yet. His eyes were staring unfocused, and little ice crystals were forming in the mop of curly brown hair that was plastered to his head. How had he gotten wet like that?
“Do you live around here?” I tried again.
His lips moved but nothing came out.
“You gotta speak up, kid.”
“I’m cold.” The sound was barely even a whisper, more a squeak than anything else.
God, I’ve got to get this kid warm, was all I kept thinking. He’s going to die if I don’t.
“You live around here?”
Again, nothing.
My house was only down the street. I grabbed hold of the boy’s hand and tried to lead him to my car, but he wouldn’t move. Maybe he wasn’t able to move. Without thinking much about it, I lifted the kid in my arms and carried him to the passenger side of my car, buckled him into the seat, and got back in the driver’s side. I turned the heater on full blast and pointed all of the vents in his direction.
“Rub yourself,” I said to the boy.
He just continued to stare forward.
“Like this.” I started rubbing my hand furiously up and down his little leg, the friction from my hand on his pants creating a little heat.
He still didn’t budge, so I moved to his other leg, his chest, and then each of his arms. The heat in the car was starting to become unbearable for me, but I knew it would be only too good for the boy. After I finished with his other arm, I took my jacket off and covered him with it like a blanket. The boy was so small it could have been a blanket.
What had happened to this poor kid?
I didn’t think how damning it would appear to people seeing me take a strange boy off the side of the street and put him in my car; I was in full-on savior mode. All of the lessons I had learned in boy scouts and as an eagle scout came flooding back to me, lessons learned about hypothermia and how to get the blood flowing through the body again so there wouldn’t be any damage. I’d have to see if I still had my old scout manuals; make sure I was doing everything I could for the boy.
Once we made it to my house, I grabbed the boy and carried him in through the garage.
“What’s your name?”
Maybe he had gone into shock. He hardly even seemed to be breathing. I knew he was still alive because his eyes moved around slightly as we made our way through the rooms of my home. I took him straight to my bedroom on the second floor, laid him on the bed, and covered him with blankets. After making sure he was completely tucked in, I went into the adjoining bathroom and started to fill the bathtub.
I knew that it would be too much of a shock to his body if I just filled the tub with hot water and threw him in. If I did that, it would feel like a million knives were stabbing him all over his skin. No, his body needed to be re-warmed gradually. So, I filled the tub halfway with lukewarm water, and then un-stoppered the drain. Because the faucet let in water at about the same rate as the drain let water out, I would be able to keep a constant flow of warm water on the boy, twisting the knob slightly every few minutes to gradually increase the temperature of the water. That should work.