By Barbara Cotter
The Colorado Springs Gazette
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The alarm sounds, and the fire engine from Colorado Springs Fire Station 8 zips out of the garage and speeds off toward a nearby apartment complex. Not because the building is on fire, but because a tenant doesn’t feel well. The patient is having severe pains that run from her lower sternum to her back. She tells the paramedic she has Crohn’s disease and an inflamed pancreas.
“Have you seen a doctor for Crohn’s recently?” asks paramedic Kevin Apuron. “No,” she says. “Should you be on meds that you’re not taking now? he says, examining several prescriptions on her dresser that are well past their expiration date. “I don’t know,” she replies. As the woman is loaded onto an ambulance, Apuron shakes his head and tells a colleague that she probably wasn’t following the most Crohn’s-friendly diet, judging from the crumpled junk food wrappers in a wastebasket near her bed.
But this is nothing new for Apuron and his colleagues at Station 8 in southeast Colorado Springs. Day in, day out, they respond to 911 calls that have nothing to do with fire, and everything to do with people who, for whatever reason, rarely get the kind of preventive medical care that might keep them from calling 911 in the first place
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