[ WP ] Write a story in which a character slowly loses his empathy and humanity because of how society treats him as well as having us empathize with him .

( 1/2; I'll post the 2nd part below ) 
 
 I work the night shift. People on television call it the'graveyard shift' or'third watch', but the 8pm-4am paramedic shift is unique to the night because all deaths have their patterns. The most common time to die of a heart attack is mid-morning, and more specifically on a Monday. The most common time for a slip-and-fall accident is 3pm on a Thursday. Spousal abuse is 6:30pm on a Friday if the victim lives, and 11:30pm Friday if the victim dies. And the most common time to die in a drunk-driving related crash is 2:45am Sunday morning. So my shift defines my patients, and I work nights. 
 
 Certain things about working a night job are hypnotically calm. I walk to the 24hr grocery store at 4:15am, bypassing the empty lines as I stroll right up to check-out with my basket and get everything scanned in a flash by the lone clerk wearing the nametag'Tim'. Somehow I do n't think it's his real name. I go home where my roommate Shane is stumbling back at the same time that I am, counting his cash from another day's artificial flirting at the gay club where he tends bar. When he's not around sometimes I go to the corner bar to play pool with the regular crowd of crackheads and tweaks still up at this time of night, descending on the only bar in town I know that's open to nightcrawlers like me. Finally I sleep in a bedroom where I've covered the window in tin foil so the sunlight does n't stream through and wake me up at 8 or 11am before I actually wake up at 3. It's not a lot of sleep, I admit. I rarely get to bed before 8am, which to'normal' people would be like a 9pm curfew, but I ca n't sleep much later without having a sense of shame at the wasted day ahead. I wake up, cook some 4pm breakfast, and go run a few sets of stadiums at the convention center as the sun starts to set over the pier. The African man and his wife are here again. They're here at least three times a week, and while he's in gym clothes she wears a full, colorful fabric garb and large headwrap, running up and down the stadium stairs as he encourages her in a language I do n't understand. They seem genuinely happy. It's curious. 
 
 I get to work shortly before 8pm and change into my uniform. I'm still relatively new to nightshift and it's nice to catch up with the noon-8pm crowd. Most car crashes ( non-drinking ) happen at 5:30pm. I'm a whiz with the jaws of life. 
 
 Today's Friday, so the gears do n't really start up until the drunken fight calls and gang violence roll in after 9pm. You'd think those calls would be later into the night once the bars are closing, but the gang neighborhood issues usually sprawl out earlier; 9-10ish, while the bar fights are more towards 2. Those are relatively easy because I'm in a public environment so it's really just a grab-and-go call; get them in the rig and on our way. What's stranger to me are the calls that invite you into the personal lives of others; getting a 911 call to someone's home and filling your head with the full context of where and how people live. You're not just picking up a drug overdose patient. You're picking up a drug overdose patient in a run-down house with rotting food in the cabinets, the thick, humid stench of waste in the bathroom, and a screaming toddler in soiled clothes reaching up from the make-shift playpen they've been placed in hours before. We call Child Protective Services for the kid but we'll never find out what happened. Not until someone calls 911 again. 
 
 The highest statistical frequency for child abuse ( pre-K ) is around 1pm. I once went to the home of a man who duct-taped his four year old son's arms together and burned him in the eye with a cigar. Apparently the kid was hyper and running, and the duct-tape/cigar combo was a lesson to stay put. I do n't have any nieces or nephews yet so I'm not sure what the correct punishment is supposed to be. That call was early in my career, and I was pretty upset by what I saw. Whenever I have a particularly bad case we inevitably have to clean our ambulance afterwards, so I get a bit of time back at our station for decontamination and I used to spend a minute in the bathroom running the sink's warm water over my hands. It was like an'all clear' sign to me, that I've left the call, cleaned myself of it, and am back to normal. Warm water on your wrists is incredibly calming. Today I had three cases of spousal abuse, a few car crashes, bar fights, and a yard fire. One of the abuse cases was victim to a frying pan, which was a new method to see. When I finish work, I swing by the 24hr grocery, buy my stir-fry dinner from Nametag Tim, and go home. Shane and I drink shit whiskey with a few of his buddies and watch a Tivo'd football game we missed during the day. I go to sleep. 
 
 Sleep, sunset, stadiums. Then back to work. This is the entirety of my existence. It's like a revolving door of injuries where the entire horror of the opening act is unveiled before me, but I never see the conclusion. Young kid stabbed six times in the stomach. His father screaming that he's the devil while still holding the knife. We wait for police escorts for those, of course, but sometimes the ambulance gets there first. So we wait. After the police stabilize the scene we patch the kid up as best we can, but he's still unstable when we get him to the ER. Will he die? I wo n't find out. I'll never hear about it again after he leaves my ambulance, and it's shocking how rarely these things end up on the news. Tonight's a saturday, so a lot of the violence and car crashes involve alcohol. In addition to the 6x stabbed abdomen, I get two different gun shot wounds, a perforated liver from a car crash, two concussions, an overdose, and a pt. anxiety attack. It's hard for me to respect things like the anxiety attack amidst all the physical injuries I see. My rig ( ambulance ) specializes in trauma response, so we only get'medical' ( internal medicine and disease ) calls when the Basic Life Support rigs are busy. When I get back from work Shane complains because my uniform smells bad. I forgot that someone threw up on me at some point tonight. I showered, but it still leaves a sort of'cologne' on your clothes. 
 
 Sleep, sunset, stadiums. I go to work. Today somebody who texted while driving slammed into another car and I have two life-threatening injuries to deal with. I load the amputated patient onto one gurney while another medic loads their collapsed lung patient onto another. It's a treadmill of injuries for the rest of the night, and I'm not sure that I remember each one individually anymore. A minute later, a week has gone by and I have n't really noticed. Not much changes. A neighbor has called 911 because Frying Pan woman was beaten again. This time her face was hit with an iron. Not a hot iron, but it does look like it might have shattered her left malar ( cheekbone ). We load her up. I do n't wonder if she'll ever leave her husband, because it's not going to happen. I wonder when that neighbor will call me again, or if she'll still be alive next time. She lives on the far side of our district and it's a long drive. 
 
 After a night of relative calm ( by our standards ), we get a call for a robbery-related GSW. Somebody shot the patient to rob a cash register, I guess. I'm tired because my shift is almost over and I'm planning the rest of my day, and as we load the GSW onto a stretcher I notice a glass-door freezer in front of me and remember I wanted to buy dinner later. I'm disoriented. I'm not supposed to be here yet. I'm at my grocery store. The Gun Shot Wound has a nametag that says'Tim'. I feel confused, because I know nobody else works here this late at night. Do we leave the store empty when we take him away? I look down again and I'm angry, because I'm not sure what I'm supposed to feel, but I get the distinct impression that something is supposed to happen when I see somebody from my world on the stretcher. But I do n't know what to look for beyond the blood loss in front of me; I'm not sure what else there is. 
 
 We have to decontaminate the rig after we drop off Gunshot Wound Tim and naturally I have to wash my hands, but I do n't keep them under the water like I used to when I wanted to calm down and return to normal. Because all of this *is* normal, and there's nowhere else to go. When my shift ends I ca n't complete my routine because the grocery is closed and surrounded by police. There are n't any other food shops open, and I rarely buy food for more than a night at a time. So instead I take a long walk home, passing by the nice side of town. All the lights are out in the houses and I wonder how many of them have people hurting their kids or spouses inside. All the homes with dirty laundry strewn about, over-turned tables when a patient has fallen over, food boiling over on the stove because they've forgotten their surroundings in a moment of crisis. At home Shane's drunk with another one-night stand; one of a neverending series of girls who met him at the club and is naive enough to think she's `` converting'' him to like women when he has all along. I do n't feel like playing pool and I'm hungry so I just go to sleep to stave off boredom instead.
