Am I the asshole for walking away from someone I recognized – someone who clearly needed help – because I was scared of what helping her might cost me?
I (50F) have been an ER charge nurse at St. Benedicts for eleven years. I’ve seen everything. Or I thought I had. I have a good life – a house, a husband, two kids in college, a 401k I’m actually proud of. I built it carefully, the way you do when you grew up without any of those things.
Her name is Donna Przybylski. I knew her when we were both 29. We worked the same floor at Mercy General – she was sharper than anyone, the kind of nurse other nurses went to when they were scared. She got married, had a kid, bought a house. Then her husband got sick, then she got sick, and I lost track of her the way you lose track of people when your own life gets loud.
She came in on a Tuesday night on a paramedic call. No ID. Hypothermic, malnourished, a gash on her forehead that needed twelve stitches. The intake form said “Jane Doe” because she wasn’t talking.
I almost didn’t recognize her.
But I did. Under the grime and the weight she’d lost and the years, it was Donna. Same nose. Same way she held her jaw tight even when she was out of it.
I told myself I didn’t recognize her.
I passed her chart to a resident and took my break.
I sat in the break room for twenty minutes telling myself it wasn’t her, that I was wrong, that getting involved would be complicated, that I had a shift to finish, that I didn’t even know her anymore, that whatever happened to her wasn’t my fault.
When I came back out, she was awake. The resident was asking her name and she was staring at the ceiling and not answering.
And then she turned her head and looked straight at me.
I don’t know if she recognized me. Her eyes were flat and tired in the way that takes a long time to get to.
I looked at my clipboard and kept walking.
My coworker Brianna caught up with me at the nurses’ station an hour later. She said, “Hey, that Jane Doe is asking for you specifically. She said your name. Said she knows you.”
My friends think I froze because of shock and that it doesn’t make me a bad person. My husband thinks I should have stopped the second I recognized her. I’ve been going back and forth on it for three days and I can’t land anywhere.
But that’s not the part I can’t stop thinking about.
When I went back to her bay to finally talk to her – her bed was empty. The resident said she’d signed out AMA twenty minutes after I walked past her.
Brianna handed me a folded piece of paper. “She left this at the desk. Said to give it to you.”
I opened it. And whatever I thought I understood about what happened to Donna – and about myself – I was wrong about all of it.
What the Note Said
It was written on the back of a patient information sheet. The handwriting was hers. Smaller than I remembered, tighter, but hers.
Carol. I saw you. I know you saw me. I’m not mad. I just wanted you to know I’m okay. I’ve been okay for eight months. I’m staying at the Elm Street shelter – it’s clean, they’re good people. The reason I wasn’t talking is because I had a warrant out of Cook County from 2019 and I didn’t know if talking would make things worse. The gash was from a fall. I wasn’t attacked. I wasn’t using. I want you to know that.
I recognized you the second you walked in. You look exactly the same.
You don’t owe me anything. You never did. I hope your life is good. It looked like it was going to be good, back then.
– Donna
I read it three times standing at the nurses’ station with Brianna pretending not to watch me.
Eight months sober. A warrant she was scared to trip. A shelter she’d called clean. She’d come in on a paramedic call and refused to identify herself not because she’d given up on everything, but because she was trying to protect the small amount of ground she’d managed to hold.
And I’d walked past her.
Who She Was at 29
Here’s the thing about Donna Przybylski that you have to understand.
She was the one who taught me how to read a rhythm strip when I was so new I was still dropping things. Not formally. Just at the nurses’ station at two in the morning, her pointing at the paper with the end of a pen, talking fast and quiet so nobody would overhear and think I didn’t know what I was doing. She covered for me twice that first year. Once when I missed a potassium level that should have flagged and once when I charted on the wrong patient and didn’t catch it for four hours.
She didn’t make a thing of it either time. Just fixed it and moved on.
She had this laugh that was too loud for the floor and she did it anyway. She brought homemade pierogi every Christmas Eve and left them in the break room without a note because she didn’t want anyone to feel like they owed her a thank you. She was the one you called when a family was falling apart in the waiting room and you didn’t know what to say. She always knew what to say.
Then she married a guy named Ray who seemed fine, and then Ray got a diagnosis at 41, and then Ray was gone by 44, and then Donna’s own health started going sideways in the way that grief sometimes makes happen. I sent a card when Ray died. I called twice. She didn’t call back and I told myself she needed space and then I told myself I’d try again later and then later just kept being later.
That’s the part my husband doesn’t know. It wasn’t just Tuesday night. I’d already walked past her once. Just slower, over about five years.
The Warrant
I looked it up the next morning. Cook County case search is public record.
Donna Przybylski. 2019. Retail theft under $500 and one count of trespassing. Both class A misdemeanors. There was a failure to appear on the trespassing charge because she’d missed the court date. The warrant had been issued in February of 2020, which was, I noted, the same month the whole world stopped making sense for everybody.
So she’d been sitting in my ER, hypothermic, twelve stitches in her forehead, and she’d done the math on what talking might cost her and decided staying quiet was safer.
She wasn’t wrong.
I don’t know what would have happened if I’d stopped. If I’d sat down next to her and said her name. Maybe nothing. Maybe she would have talked, maybe we would have figured out the warrant situation, maybe she would have let us run a full workup instead of leaving with just the stitches and a tetanus shot.
Maybe she would have walked out anyway. Maybe my stopping would have made it worse.
I keep running the scenarios and I can’t get any of them to come out clean.
What I Did Next
I called the Elm Street shelter the next morning. Wednesday, around 9am, after I’d dropped my younger kid’s old winter coat and two pairs of boots in a bag by the door and then stood there for a while not picking it up.
A woman named Greta answered. She confirmed they had a resident named Donna and that yes, she’d come back the night before, and no, she couldn’t give me any more information than that.
I said I was an old friend. That I worked at St. Benedicts. That Donna had been a patient and I wanted to make sure she was okay.
Greta said, “She mentioned you.”
I didn’t know what to do with that so I just said okay.
Greta said, “She said you were good people, back in the day. She said to tell you she doesn’t need anything.”
I asked if I could leave my number. Greta said she’d pass it along.
I picked up the bag with the coat and the boots and drove to Elm Street and left it with the front desk without a note because I didn’t know what to write and also because I’m not Donna. I don’t have her instinct for the right gesture. I just had a coat and some boots and the sense that doing nothing else was going to eat me alive.
That was six days ago.
The Question I Can’t Answer
My husband thinks the answer is simple. You see someone you know, someone in trouble, you stop. Full stop. Everything else is rationalization.
He’s not wrong. But he also grew up with a safety net so wide he never had to think about what it cost to maintain one. He’s never had to calculate. He loves me and he doesn’t understand that some people spend their whole lives doing math in their heads, subtracting risk, protecting what they built, because they know exactly how fast it goes.
That’s not an excuse. I’m not offering it as one.
I’m trying to explain that when I saw Donna in that bay, the first thing that moved through me wasn’t “how do I help her.” It was something more like fear. Not of her. Of the version of life she was living. Of how close that version is to the version I came from. Of the fact that the distance between my 401k and a hypothermic Jane Doe in bay four is mostly just luck and timing and a few decisions that could have gone differently.
I saw her and I thought: I can’t let that touch me.
And then I walked away from a woman who taught me how to read a rhythm strip at two in the morning and brought pierogi every Christmas Eve and never once asked me for anything.
She Hasn’t Called
It’s been six days.
Brianna asked me about it once, the day after. I said it was an old friend, complicated situation, she was okay. Brianna nodded and didn’t push because Brianna is good at reading when not to push.
My husband asks every couple of days if I’ve heard anything. I say no. He squeezes my shoulder and says she knows where to find me if she wants to.
I keep my phone on loud.
The thing I can’t stop thinking about isn’t whether I’m the asshole. I know the answer to that. I was. I did a cowardly thing for reasons that felt real but weren’t good enough.
The thing I can’t stop thinking about is that note.
You don’t owe me anything. You never did.
She wrote that. Donna, who had every reason to be furious, who’d watched me look at my clipboard and keep walking, who’d said my name to a stranger at a nurses’ station and waited and then left anyway. She wrote that I didn’t owe her anything and I think she meant it and I think that’s the part that’s going to take me a long time to sit with.
Because she’s right. I didn’t owe her anything.
But I wanted to.
I still do.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it on. Someone else needs to read it.
If you’re still reeling from this story, you might find yourself connecting with the narrator of My Brother Vanished Eleven Years Ago. Last Tuesday I Saw Him Laughing in a Grocery Store. or perhaps you’ll understand why Derek’s Face Went White the Second We Walked Through the Door. And for a different kind of reveal, read about how The Insurance Company’s “Appeals Coordinator” Left a Paper Trail I Wasn’t Supposed to Find.
