I rolled around in blood for about 50 minutes today after getting brushed to the ground twice by a seventeen year old idiot who claims to be in the Mexican Mafia. This is sort of a long story. More after the jump.

I’m not exactly sure if I believe his claim to gang affiliation, but I do figure you have to be either insane or have a death wish to state you’re something your not when it comes to that sort of thing. He punched out a window (hence the blood) and threw a table and Christmas tree in my general direction when two other girls and I attempted to get him on the ground. He has the oddly chivalrous claim that he would “never hit a woman”, which held true throughout today (I do believe he knocked me down in the nicest manner possible without intent to hurt, only to get me off of him), but by the end of that hour o’ blood, I think the term “I’m going to start fucking people up - I don’t care if you all are girls or not” did escape his lips. It’s nice to know that I make a difference in people’s thinking.

By the by, hands bleed a surprising amount after being shoved through glass.

After receiving a shot of Haldol in the ass and being locked in a little cell, he still managed to jump up, grab the state mandated smoke detector bolted to the ceiling of this cell, bash it into the ground, and attempt to cut out the veins of his anterior forearms with the resulting pieces of jagged metal and plastic. Two other gangbangers decided to go off at this moment and start running around screaming. We’re able to get them into “Quiet Rooms” (aka - cells that we leave unlocked) without much of a problem. As I instruct people to rush the cell that holds Shanky McBleedy and get all of that away from him, the fire alarm goes off due to the now dangling wires where the smoke detector once resided. The alarm is deafening. Kids are being guided through the evacuation process while three people are attempting to get the plastic debris away from Shanky. If I can’t get the alarm off quickly, by state law, we have to evacuate all kids from the premises, including those in cells; it doesn’t matter if it’s a false alarm. It takes me at least two minutes to figure out how to silence the damn thing, because the fire alarm panel looks somewhat like this:

The fire department shows up in a record 5 minutes (before I can call and tell them it’s a false alarm) and I have to run outside and explain that there is no fire, some kid just ripped a smoke detector off of the wall. One of the firemen insists on seeing the damaged wires while two other ones are smirking. I tell him I can’t let him see it. He asks why. I explain the situation in a roundabout way and one of the other guys, in an act of mercy, laughs and tells the questioner that is normal “around here”. I run back inside.

The fire alarm system is set up to coincide with the magnetic locking system integrated into the doors. If the fire alarm goes off, all the locks unlock and refuse to lock back up until whatever is making the alarm go off gets fixed. Neil, from the fire alarm company, is at a Christmas party at his sister-in-law’s. It’ll “be a few hours” until he can come up. Wow. Thanks Neil.

The doors stay unlocked for two hours. Much lying to the kids about things still being functional commences.

To wrap it up, I end up spending about seven minutes at the end of the night trying to scrub blood out from under my fingernails. Surprisingly, I’m in a better mood than one would expect about the entire thing. I work an overnight tomorrow and am on-call for the morning shift. I would say there’s about a 90% chance I get activated to go into work in about three hours because this morning will more than likely be a repeat of the above evening. But I’m okay and the people I work with (both friends and patients) are too.

On an ending note, my left elbow kind of hurts though. I think I landed on it weird during that second go at getting dropped to the floor.