The woman washing blood off the floor of the Johannesburg Hospital trauma unit said she was used to it.
"You just move," she said, wiping down a blood-stained plastic chair.
She was kept busy throughout Monday night as Joburg welcomed 2008 with fireworks, noise, celebrations and the violence of a small-scale civil war.
By 4am on Tuesday, the sister in charge of the trauma unit, Renette Churchill, had recorded 48 patients since Monday. Of these, 35 arrived since Churchill's shift started at 7pm.
There were at least five people injured by gunshots, 13 stabbed, six assaulted and three injured by rubber bullets.
Police later said it had been a quiet night.
A busy doctor wearing a T-shirt labelled "Consultant" paused for a minute to explain that staff had to triage patients, or prioritise by urgency.
"We take the very seriously injured or potentially seriously injured. We prioritise according to who's dying, first," he said.
At least six people had hands shredded by firecrackers.
One was a 16-year-old immigrant girl from Hillbrow, who sat quietly while her hand was bandaged. Bones protruded from the shattered fingers of her right hand, and a doctor said the fingers would probably have to be partially amputated. The girl is right-handed.
She arrived before midnight with a man who would say little about her circumstances, except that he wasn't her father and she didn't attend school.
"She was just playing with a 'cricket' [firecracker] outside the flat," he said.
Several victims said the fireworks were "bomb crackers" and blew up immediately after being lit.
Another 16-year-old, a boy, also lost fingers on his right hand to a bomb cracker and was carried, half-collapsed in agony, into the hospital by his friends.
Even medical staff unwrapping his emergency bandaging grimaced when they saw the extent of his injury. He was also right handed.
"You see, you should ban fireworks," commented a doctor.
Three people were injured by rubber bullets fired by police in Hillbrow and Berea. All three shootings had been unprovoked. One victim, a woman shot in a restaurant and waiting for an operation to remove a rubber missile, lay silently on a bed clutching a Bible.
At midnight, fireworks marking the new year could be seen from the hospital entrance and a small group gathered briefly to cheer in 2008.
Fifteen minutes later, a steady stream of patients started arriving.
The first three patients of 2008 - all arriving within minutes of each other - were a 16-year-old boy with a badly gashed face, a man missing fingers from an exploding firework and a man with both legs broken after falling from a building.
"They've started," muttered a doctor, and everyone efficiently got to work.
The teenager's family said his older brother had attacked him with a broken bottle.
"He was fighting with his brother," said his aunt. Staff asked why the boy appeared to be drunk, but she couldn't say.
The teenager spent hours huddled on a chair, his face hidden in a huge bandage, weeping quietly while waiting his turn for treatment.
Throughout the night, patients were brought in by Tacmed, a specialised unit of six volunteer paramedics who looked like a Swat team in helmets and bullet-proof vests.
They specialise in working in hostile environments where ordinary ambulance services can't go and were brought in by the provincial government to work in Hillbrow for the night.
"It's f***ing chaos," said a Tacmed paramedic after a trip from Hillbrow.
The team travels in a massive armoured ambulance called Mfezi, meaning "cobra" in isiZulu.
Tacmed owner Morne Rossouw said team members were qualified paramedics trained for high-risk situations and he had lost count of the number of people they had taken to the Hillbrow clinic. "It's extremely difficult, it's an absolute mission."
The work is an adrenaline rush.
"We love it," said Rossouw.
They dropped off a man shot in the thigh. The injured man, Stanford Sibiya, said he had been shot while trying to get home after working late at a Rosebank restaurant.
"This is a bad place," he said of Hillbrow.
The Tacmed team were back soon afterwards with a man with multiple stab wounds
"We were flagged down by metro police a block from here. We don't know if he was stabbed and thrown from a balcony," said Rossouw.
About 1.15am Gauteng Emergency Medical Services (EMS) and three policemen arrived with a suspect shot in the head in Doornfontein. None of the policemen would say what had happened, but on Wednesday police told Sapa that a security guard had been shot in the head and critically injured when he and two friends broke into a shop in Doornfontein five minutes before New Year. He was shot by another guard inside the shop.
A party in Yeoville collapsed in a fight; a young woman and a man were brought in with stab wounds. Hours later the woman heard that her small child, who had been with her at the time, was safe.
"It's very busy," said a Gauteng EMS paramedic who brought the pair in. The paramedics removed their metal bodyboard from under the man; the board was full of blood and the man was immobilised in a neck brace.
Some people were hauled in by friends or relatives, collapsing at the trauma unit entrance.
After staff efficiently identified those needing urgent help and whisked them off to resuscitation rooms. Once when all staffers were busy, ambulance paramedics helped with resuscitation.
At about 2.30am a young man arrived bleeding from a stab wound to the head, clutching a bloodied framed photograph of his girlfriend, who he'd been on his way to visit.
At 2.40am Tacmed brought in a man on a bodyboard with a skull fracture and other injuries; he had apparently been hit by a brick. There was a brief pause to search for a bed on which to unload him.
He was accompanied by a woman with a baby on her back. The woman was unsteady on her feet, reeked of urine, and could say only that they were walking in Hillbrow when her partner "just fell down".
By 3am the unit was overflowing and people with less serious injuries were sent elsewhere.
A man in a wheelchair with deep lacerations in his head climbed out of the chair and fell asleep on the floor in the doorway. Staff said he seemed to have been drinking.
Patients with non-serious injuries must pay before treatment. "If they can drink, they can pay," Churchill told the argumentative relative of an obviously drunk patient, suggesting she phone a friend for some money.
By 3am aggressive friends of patients were shouting at staff, demanding assistance for people who did not have life-threatening injuries and were being referred elsewhere.
Outside in the waiting room, two men resumed a fight started before they arrived, and Churchill ordered them out of the hospital.
The unit smelt of blood and sweat, but staff kept going and cleaners kept mopping.
Trauma unit staff wore T-shirts with pictures and slogans painted on them to mark the new year instead of their usual medical overalls.
"Don't you start with me," warned one T-shirt. "Terminator" announced another.
"No Red Bull needed!" assured a third - although a few hours later its wearer was ignoring that claim.
In between the rush of patients, staff smiled and joked with each other.
Brian Gritzman is a volunteer paramedic who helps when he's not studying for his actuarial science degree at Wits University.
He regards his paramedic work as a hobby: "I've just got a passion for it."
One nurse left the private sector for the government hospital's trauma unit. "I'm enjoying myself," she said of her year at the unit.
A paramedic from VAS Emergency Medical Services, Mosibudi Mogashoa, said she liked helping people.
"It's our brothers and sisters - we're supposed to save their lives," said her colleague Samson Moloi.
Volunteers from Hatzolah Medical Rescue helped to transfer serious cases from elsewhere.
One doctor said all the patients were drunk but it was pointless getting impatient. "Shouting isn't going to help me," he said, before heading off to deal with another patient with the same compassion he had shown all night.
On Wednesday, police said it had been a quieter New Year than usual in Joburg.
Superintendent Eugene Opperman said 12 injuries were reported to police but all these related to incidents outside the city centre and surrounding suburbs. No injuries were reported to police from Hillbrow or Yeoville, although Opperman said some may have been reported to hospitals.
Opperman said 81 people were arrested on New Year's Eve but none on New Year's Day. Reasons for arrests included public drunkenness, fighting, illegal firework sales and illegal possession of weapons.
He said police fired rubber bullets in Pretorius Street in Hillbrow when they were ambushed and pelted with bottles and stones, and again at a restaurant in Hillbrow after someone tried to throw boiling water at police officers.
"But it was considerably quieter than previous years," said Opperman.
