I've got blood in the back of my cab

The other day while I was shadowing paramedics, we had just dropped off a patient and were sitting by the emergency department entrance, waiting for one other paramedic to finish up on a phone call before we left the hospital.

A cabbie pulled up and rolled down his window, and shouted at us through a thick accent, “I’ve got blood in the back.”

“Huh?” one of the paramedics replied.

“Blood – I’ve got blood in the back of my cab,” he said again, using his thumb to point at the back seat.

We looked at each other, not sure what to do, until one paramedic turned to the cabbie and said, “Here’s what you do – get some water, and some hydrogen peroxide, and you’ll be able to scrub it out real nice.”

The cabbie mumbled something, and drove off.

We started shaking our heads when he pulled up to the front door of the hospital.

“What’s he doing?? Does he actually want a nurse to come out and clean the back of his cab for him?”

He popped the trunk, got out of his cab, and walked to the back. He reached into the trunk and pulled out a big cardboard box.

“Ohhhhhhh,” we all said, as the lightbulbs went on.

Here we’d been trying to picture the cabbie wanting to clean up after some drunk ride all cut up from a bar fight bled all over in the back seat.

Instead, I had simply witnessed for myself the apparent courier system for the blood bank.