Not an emergency, ma’am: witnessing Edith Rodriguez’s death

I posted a little bit on this on Cypher&Syllable last week, but it’s time to listen more closely. The original 911 recording and some transcription are after the jump.

Via Racialicious, I found this article at the L.A. Times, regarding Edith Isabel Rodriguez’s death at the Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital:

… the existence of a security videotape showing the woman writhing for 45 minutes on the floor of the emergency room lobby and the public release this week of two 911 calls in which witnesses unsuccessfully pleaded with sheriff’s dispatchers for help.The case — first reported by The L.A. Times — has crystallized people’s fears that even in their most desperate moments, the emergency system won’t take them seriously.

Indeed. Though it’s interesting that the LAT story, as well as others I have looked at, take the angle that Rodriguez’s death is about a failure in the U.S. healthcare system. I won’t dispute that, but it is also important to recognize that this isn’t something that could “happen to anyone”; it’s not, as Arthur Caplan is quoted as saying in the article above, about “a kind of morality tale of a society gone cold.”

The story of Edith Rodriguez’s death is a story about how people of color are treated in the American healthcare system, a system whose structural brokenness amplifies the moral and ethical emptiness with which many blacks and Latinos are treated in American social systems. That system, it is safe to say, has always been cold as ice.

You can hear the emptiness in the calls made to 911, as Ms. Rodriguez was writhing on the hospital floor, bleeding and vomiting. And you can also hear the callers hearing it– which makes an understatement out of the LAT’s assessment of the situation as “crystallizing” people’s fears. It didn’t “crystallize,” i.e. make apparent or bring into focus. It was merely a repetition of the too-real surreality people face everyday.

Even if you’ve heard the report discussed on TV, this one is worth listening to. Many of the accounts are quite edited and I’m not even sure where CNN gets their transcripts from; they’re barely related to the original text. An abridged transcript follows (my emphasis in color):

Operator: What’s your emergency?

Caller: There’s a lady on the ground… and we’re here in the emergency room .. and they are overlooking her.

Operator: Well, what would you want me to do for you, ma’am?

Caller: Send an ambulance out here to take her somewhere where she can get medical help.

Operator: OK, you’re at the — you’re at the hospital, ma’am. You have to contact them.

Caller: They have — they have a problem. They won’t help her…

[...]

Operator: … This line is for emergency purposes only. This — 911 is used for emergency purposes only.

Caller: This is an emergency, mister.(crosstalk)Operator: It’s not an emergency. It is not an emergency, ma’am.

Caller: It is.

Operator: It is not an emergency.

Caller: You have to see how they are treating her.

Operator: OK. Well, that’s not a criminal thing. This line, 911, is used for emergency purposes only.

Caller: It is an emergency.

Operator: … life threatening emergencies. It’s not. OK?

Caller: May God strike you too for acting the way you just acted.

Operator: No, negative m’am. You’re the one.

The painful quality of this conversation. It begins with the Kafkaesque surreality of this interaction as a scene of fundamental non-communication: “It is an emergency”; “It is not an emergency,” and it deepens the symbolic weight of an already tragic death.

There is something important in this conversation about recognition, about who has authority to understand a situation, and who has the power to ignore or negate that authority. I hear this in the ways the first caller signifies the power dynamic she is experiencing. You can hear her holding her voice, trying to sound knowledgeable and official as she talks to the operator, but also using language that signifies her awareness that she and the woman dying on the floor are fundamentally unrecognizable as subjects: “they are overlooking her.” And the caller knows whom she is talking to. “This is an emergency, mister.”

He hears something in her voice too. Is it race? What in her voice tells him that he really doesn’t have to listen? That this person has nothing relevant to say or cannot possibly know what she is talking about? Maybe it’s by virtue of where the call is coming from, a poor city hospital, an emergency room qua primary care facility, supposedly filled with people lacking wherewithal, lacking knowledge.

His condescension, cloaked and bathed in protocol, is in the “OK, you’re at… the hospital,” and his authority is implicit in the “OK. Well, that’s not a criminal thing“– which comes in response to the caller’s insistence that she who is present, not he who is not, knows and understands what is happening in this moment. Speaking on the problem of representing traumatic events, the holocaust scholar Dori Laub once noted that many situations we might think of as crises in witnessing– meaning that we aren’t getting testimony that really presents an event properly– instead constitute crises in listening. People are signifying, but we don’t recognize it, and thus don’t hear it.

I am not suggesting that the operator should be anything but official and professional, but here there is something specific in that tone. It’s hard to hear it if you aren’t used to hearing it. The caller is familiar, and it sets her off.

I am sure the 911 operator was shocked when the curse came: “May God strike you too for acting the way you just acted.” Her “too” is broad, aligning the operator with the dominant power structure that has brought them all to this tragedy. Who knows what race he is, but the operator is speaking through and for a kind of power. Tellingly, after her curse his diction switches more fully into a language of structural authority, “No, negative ma’am. You’re the one.”

10-4 ma’am. I don’t hear you.

I am reminded of when I was in labor with my son (you know, the one stolen by Sanjaya Malakar’s sister). It was after midnight on a Sunday, and the anesthesiologist, white and grumpy, was clearly irritated with my needing him, or rather, needing my epidural. He was cold and rough with me. Not rough like mean but rough like I was meat, which is worse.

The nurse, who was black, noticed this, and said something like, Marisa here is a professor at [insert fancy college name here]. It is silly, but this is information I often withhold unless relevant. I dislike giving some people the pleasure of “knowing” me, when otherwise I might well be, let’s say, invisible to them. The nurse, meanwhile, deployed it, thus assuring me better treatment.

It worked: thus informed, that ass stopped in the middle of what he was doing (i.e. preparing a needle for my spine), walked around the bed, held out his hand and introduced himself. In my affiliation I had suddenly flashed into subjecthood, transformed from she who required no recognition into she who was someone to know. To care about. To connect with.

Needless to say, we didn’t hit it off. I think my disinterest in him stressed him out.