By Michael Morse
An EMT student needed ride time, I’m always happy to oblige.
I enjoy riders, the area where Rescue Co. 1 responds is colorful; larger than life characters roam the streets, gang members frequent our space often, sometimes full of holes, sometimes not. Struggling families live here, some for generations, others fresh from wherever it is they come from, undocumented and living quietly. Factories and bars exist in tandem.
Our student showed up for her shift on time. Her name was Ashley, and she couldn’t wait to see some action. She had missed a shooting by an hour, and as luck would have it she left an hour before a mass casualty with a fatality on the highway.
Our first call with Ashley was for an intoxicated male. We found him sitting in a doorway, an empty fifth of vodka next to him. As far as street people go, he’s one of the better ones.
He’s polite, and still had enough get up and go flirt with Ashley. He tried to stand and stumbled. His bag fell open, spilling hundreds of condoms onto the ground.
“I’m HIV positive,” he explained, stuffing the things back in, “but I’m worth the risk!”
We helped him, with his bag of condoms, into the ambulance. Even Ashley gave him a gloved hand. We took him to the ER for detox.
Before we left the hospital we got another call for intoxicated male.
Oswaldo stood next to the payphone holding on for dear life to keep from falling. Usually animated and affable, today he was soaking wet, depressed and freezing. His New York Yankees cap hid his eyes until he sat on the bench seat, shivering, and looked up.
Right at Ashley.
“I’m so cold,” he said, and tears streamed down his face, and he curled up in a ball, and lay on the bench as I covered him with some blankets. He stayed there during the ride, shivering, saying how he didn’t want to do this anymore. He begged for help, his despondency filling the little space, making it impossible not to feel his despair.
At the station Ashley was quiet and introspective. Mike showed her the equipment, meds and talked about the shooting and how she just missed a “good one.”
An hour later a twelve-year-old called 911 because his grandmother had fallen. We found an intoxicated fifty-five-year-old, nearly incoherent and highly volatile who was entrusted with her two grandchildren for the night. The eight-year-old cried as her grandmother yelled at us to leave.
Ashley remained quiet, taking it all in. The atmosphere in the house was oppressive while we waited for the kid’s father to arrive. The 8-year-old girl bravely tried to console her sobbing grandmother. The boy who called 911 hid upstairs. He was a little more aware of what was going on. He was embarrassed.
An hour after that a call came in for a man unconscious in his car. We quickly discovered he was dead. Ashley stood to the side and watched. Running a code in the streets in nothing like anything an 18-year-old EMT student has ever seen. Absolute chaos to an inexperienced onlooker. Plain old chaos to those doing the job.
We found a pulseless, asystolic man dead in his car and delivered a pulseless man with a treatable rhythm to the ER, IV’s going, intubated with Narcan and some cardiac drugs on board. If he didn’t come back to life the outcome was out of our hands long before we found him. I knew this and most of the people who worked on him knew this, but I wasn’t so sure about Ashley.
I remember my first encounter with CPR. I thought everybody survived until then. EMS is a difficult road, one with more hidden potholes than people new to it could ever imagine.
Ashley smiled bravely, said thank you and left around 2 a.m.
An hour later all hell broke loose on the highway. A wrong-way driver collided head on with a car full of people seconds after causing three other vehicles to crash, one tipping over. I managed to get close enough to the body to feel for pulses, but I couldn’t tell the state police if the wrong-way driver was male or female.
“Too bad Ashley missed the good ones,” Mike said as the sun broke the horizon.
I knew what Mike meant, but think Ashley did see the good ones. The shootings and catastrophic wrecks don’t tell the whole story. Ashley benefited far more from experiencing the day-to-day grind. EMS isn’t all shootings and mass casualty incidents. Most of the time it’s about connecting with the people we treat and making them feel better.
