PAPER OF PLASTIC?

November 20, 2006

I wrote “Paper or Plastic?” after a call that left me shaking my head, standing in the middle of some stranger’s shattered life with nothing but a red biohazard bag and the sense that I was pretending this job made sense.

The call itself wasn’t unusual—trauma, blood, maybe a death. I don’t remember the patient’s name. I rarely did, especially when it ended badly. What I do remember is cleaning up afterward. Standing in that living room, surrounded by the kind of mess that doesn’t wipe away with bleach, and being handed a thin, dollar-store plastic bag to “dispose of the trash.”

That bag? It ripped. Of course it did. Because what else would it do?

And in that moment—holding a shredded bag full of bloodied gauze and broken dignity—I thought: This is it. This is the metaphor. This is the goddamn job.

So I wrote about it. I leaned into the absurdity. Compared it to shopping at Safeway. Paper or plastic? Oh, definitely plastic—thin, inadequate, liable to burst open and dump everything you were trying to hide all over the floor.

It was funny on the surface. But underneath, I think I was trying to say something real: that we were expected to carry too much in containers that couldn’t hold it. That no one wanted to think about what happened after the ambulance drove away. That the cleanup—literal and emotional—was always left to us.

That post wasn’t about the plastic bag. It was about the weight. And how ridiculous it felt to try and contain something so heavy with something so disposable.

I wasn’t just venting. I was trying to make sense of the quiet, stupid rituals of grief and bureaucracy that medics carry without ever really talking about.

And for what it’s worth? That bag still haunts me more than most of the patients.