Editor’s note: We got so many great story submissions during our spring EMS week contest 2010, we’ve decided to run a few of our favorite entries. Here is one of our staff’s picks. View all entries here, and check out our grand-prize winner.
By Ben Sande
Paramedic (Wash.)
“City Medic, City Fire, Level 2 response, 1111 1st St, Dirty Bar and Pub for 47 y/o female ground level fall.”
On arrival we found a 47-year-old female who looked like she was 75. Her stringy, shoulder length, hair disheveled and her face wrinkled and used hard. She was wearing a black leather jacket and a young girl’s mini skirt. The smell of alcohol wafted from her breath as she stumbled a little outside of the bar with a cigarette hanging from her mouth.
I introduced myself and she eyed me up and down then grinned, “That sombich hurt my hip. I dun fell over an now I can’t hardly walk.” She swayed back and forth a little.
I had my crew start vitals and get out a backboard, and I started assessing her. I had to steady her several times during the interview and we determined she needed to be in full spinal precautions because of a lump on her head and complaint of neck pain. As I gave the order to my partner to let go of her, she stumbled yet again, bending over to catch herself. Her skirt went up around her hips, and her butt faced us with no underwear. Gag.
She wheezed a laugh as she up righted herself, “Bet you didn’t think you’d get a free show tonight honey. Hey, think I could have some of that morphine?” she asked, flashing her best smile.
No. Sorry, no morphine tonight. I didn’t really want to deal with her. She smelled, she was obnoxious, and crass. We gave her the three minute ride to the hospital and left her in their competent care.
Over the next year we were there for Jenny over and over, most of the time she was insanely intoxicated and had fallen, or her boyfriend had beat on her. We developed a rapport. She’d see me and make jokes about how I stalk her in the ambulance and that we were a couple.
I got to talk to her several times about the seriousness of her drinking and the need to stop. She would get somber and agree with me and tell me she just wasn’t able to. I would tell her it was going to kill her. And she would look at me with tears in her eyes and tell me she knew that. But she wouldn’t or couldn’t stop. She knew what she was, what she had become. She would ask “Why do you keep helping me?”
I would just smile and reply “It’s what we do.”
On the way back from a call one day, we were toned for a structure fire. We were less then a block away in our medic unit, and we arrived while dispatch was still toning at Jenny’s house. We gave a size up and started our walk around to find the front door was open. I leaned down to look under the banked down smoke and saw Jenny in the hallway about 15 feet inside.
My partner and I rushed to crawl in and drag her out of harms way. She was conscious and very short of breath and crying. We started treating her with nebulized albuterol and atrovent with O2 and she told me what happened.
Her abusive boyfriend had left and she didn’t want to live, so she started the fire and sat down to die in it. We transported her, consoled her and talked to her about now being the time to get help. She seemed hopeful. She thanked us.
I didn’t see her for almost a year, I don’t know if she had gotten help or went to jail or what happened. But the next time I saw her was the last. It was a freezing November morning and we were toned to a vacant lot near her house for a possible D.O.A.
We got on scene and a bystander walked us over to the middle of the field and there was Jenny, laying motionless. Her face was pale white, a bottle of cheap booze in her frozen hand. I checked her pulse, though I already knew. I felt a little sad. Sad that she couldn’t break free. Sad that maybe I could have done more. Sad that it ended like this, at 48 years old, frozen in a vacant lot.
I still think of Jenny sometimes and she reminds me to have compassion no matter what the circumstances of the people I am dealing with. She reminds me that when those tones go off it does not matter who they are for, or why. It doesn’t even matter what it is they are calling for. It is my job to be there, and when I can, to make a difference.
Even if it is just befriending someone that feels unlovely and unloved. It may not be that they don’t want to stop their destructive behaviors, it may be that they can’t. And to top it off, it may be me in that position someday, or someone in my family.
But for the grace of God, there go I.