I will take that leftover Valium

I seriously considered saying this out loud last week, upon realizing that the top half of my ass was exposed, I was missing a shoe, and my cute blazer lay in a crumpled mess in the middle of the floor, surrounded by exiting paramedics and overturned tables and chairs. 

But this is not of those stories.  And I make light of things because it helps me to deal with the fact that I did not sign up for this.  And by this, I mean having a student have a seizure in my class.  And not just one seizure, but five of them.  And by five of them I mean the first one lasted for three minutes, and watching a child go through this, knowing that you can't do much to help or stop them, while the child's friends watch until you tell them to get out, is not a fun experience for a control freak who has no experience with this sort of thing.  Especially when the nurse takes her sweet-ass time getting there, and then nonchalantly tells you that you shouldn't hold her hand because any external stimulus could trigger another attack.  Or when the paramedics finally get there, and keep calling her by the wrong name and loudly tell her that they're about to stick her with a needle and that it will hurt a lot, and then they keep repeating this because they can't find a vein, so that when she does come out of one seizure, you can't really blame her for having another, due to all of the "excitement."

So yeah, I kept touching her leg, and trying to talk to her, because I figured that a familiar face would at least be of better than the other stimuli.  And therein lies the problem:  I do not welcome, or accept these maternal feelings that teaching forces out of me.  Give me a dog to rescue, or something else that can wordlessly accept my help, so that I can give myself a pat on the back and go back to my normal life without anyone telling me that my good intentions are only making someone's life worse.  Because this whole thing wasn't about the fact that I didn't even see her fall down because I was printing up the interim report cards that they would immediately throw away.  Or that I ignored the first mumblings of distress because I figured they were just being their usual post-lunch, high fructose corn syrup selves.  Or that when one of the "hero" teachers, who may or may not have been a medic back in 'Nam came in to try to take over, I gave him a savage look that sayingt I remembered him taking bets on which female students would turn out to be strippers, and that his services would not be needed at this point and time. 

This is about the aftermath.  How her mom seemed reluctant to leave work to go meet the paramedics at the hospital.  How the student had been unsuccessfully Baker-acted the day before because she said she wanted to hurt herself.  This is about how all of her friends felt the need to tell me about her eating disorders and drug-use.  And of course, it is about having to take all of this home with me at the end of the day while trying to forget it happened.  And handling her showing up to talk to me during lunch this week, after not seeing her for a week.  Duh, it's not about me.  It's about her.  And I don't want it to be about me, in the sense that I don't want to be involved in a way that will affect her for better or worse.  I just want to teach English and go home.  And if paramedics are involved, and I'm missing clothes, I want it to be an entirely different scenario altogether.