My father is a pharmacist.
On August 2, 1976, two wasteoids just like this one walked into his drugstore, emptied the till, emptied the narcotics safe, and shot my father in the chest with a .357
He survived, minus one lung, his spleen, a kidney, and 1/3 of his liver. Oh, and five pints of blood.
Just for maximum irony, my grandmother and aunt, his mother and sister, were both working in the emergency room when Dad came in. He required an immediate thoracotamy, because the defibrillator was still years off, and his heart had to be kept beating manually while his superior vena cava was patched in the ER.
I was six, and trying to scam pre-dinner cookies from my mother when Grandma called. The Call. To this day, I see her, in her painting clothes, in our old kitchen, I see her knees buckle, her face turn from sunburnt to gray.
I have a disembodied memory of Mom carrying us into the hospital, the cameras on us...it was a Very Big Deal at the time.
After almost two months, dad came home...and he was never the same.
The guy that did the shooting served seven years. When he got out, he picked up where he left off and was killed by a pharmacist in California. His accomplice served four, and died of a heart attack last year after living a life with, one assumes, all his vital organs intact.
That pharmacist shouldn't have been tried for murder. He should have shot both of those idiots fifteen times a piece and been given a medal. For every cop I hear whining about how he worries about not coming home...there's a pharmacist thinking it in silence who doesn't have a TV show or a medal or a monument, because for some reason, pharmacists are disposable.
