Left of the Dial

Early one cold December morning, as the sun was rising, we responded to a call at a private residence for an unconscious person. I parked on the street behind the fire rescue and I followed my partner through the front door of the house. In the living room, an elderly woman sat rocking back and forth in a chair, with two chihuahuas in her lap. She pointed towards the back door. “He’s out there,” she said. Outside on the patio, sitting on a white, plastic five-gallon bucket, with his shoulders wedged between a washing machine and a wooden pole holding up a tin roof, was a thirty-odd-year-old man. His face was purple, his head slumped towards the floor, his arms hung lifeless at his side. A foamy, white liquid dripped out of his nose and mouth. I stepped forward and touched my fingers to the side of his neck. I felt only cold dead flesh. On top of the washing machine, I saw a small pipe and a pill bottle on its side with a few painkilling tablets strewn about.
    The FD Lieutenant barked at the trainee next to him. “Don’t just stand there, get him off the bucket and on to the ground.” The young rookie seemed frozen in place as he stared blankly at the corpse’s ever-darkening face. Finally, his feet moved and he followed orders pulling the dead man onto the patio concrete. As his body touched down the plastic bucket tipped over, spilling a dozen or more lemons around our feet. The man stepped outside on this brisk morning to get high and probably do some laundry and as he tried to make himself comfortable in-between the machines and the makeshift lean-to, he succumbed to the massive number of downers in his system, passing out and dying of positional asphyxiation. There’s a joke here somewhere about life and lemons but I don’t care to make it.

  New Years morning my partner and I responded to an assault that turned out to be a murder. A neighbor walking their dog heard a cry for help and called 911. An elderly female lay just inside the doorway to the home, sitting upright, her back resting against a wall spattered with blood. Her face was swollen with both eyes bulging like purple plums, threatening to burst from their sockets. As she was being attended to by several paramedics I looked past the doorway, into the house. Not far from her I could see the legs and lower torso of what would be a second victim. I felt like time slowed as police officers moved past me, in and out of the scene, radios squelching about blocking off neighborhood streets. The lady in the doorway asked repeatedly about her brother, saying that she hadn't heard anything from him for hours. I looked for my partner as I'd lost track of him only to see him near the side of the house, vomiting. I decided against going any further than where I stood outside on the steps.
    I got more of the story from some of the officers once we were at the hospital. A longtime friend of theirs who'd just been released from jail had stopped by to visit and celebrate the New Year. At some point, the friend asked to borrow their car and when they declined, he became enraged, grabbed a marble angel statue off the mantel and proceeded to beat the both of them to death with it. He made sure her brother was dead, crushing his skull, but somehow only managed to beat the lady unconscious. She ended up with a subdural brain bleed and a subarachnoid cranial fracture. She lived and a few days later the suspect was arrested and charged with murder.
       
     The Williams Park Hotel in downtown St. Petersburg is a shithole right out of early 1980’s New York. A junkie rat trap of Sid and Nancy proportions. We crammed ourselves and our equipment into the tiny elevator and watched the brick shaft move through the holes in the elevator walls. A static buzzer indicated our floor and I pushed our stretcher out into the hallway. The smell of stale cigarettes, booze, and body odor hung in the air mixing with the stains on the hall carpet and the distant playing music. A slightly opened door revealed a cramped room and a floor splattered with orange vomit. A small towel lay in the center of the puke pool, struggling to soak up all that it could. A young woman sat in a chair at a small dinner table, she swayed back and forth, orange liquid running down her chin. An older man sat shirtless on the bed. He pointed over his shoulder towards her. “She be drinking this shit every night, fuckin’ sanitizer and shit.” He said.
   “I didn’t drink hand sanitizer!” She yelled back, wiping the Nyquil from her face, raising up from her chair.
“Then what the fuck you call this shit all over my floor, huh?” He stood up and pointed to the puddle of orange liquid. She sank back down in the chair. The gray streaks in her hair made her look older than she was. Her body trembled. “I swear I wasn’t trying to hurt myself, I just wanted the shaking to stop so I could sleep.” She said. “I was just tryin’ to detox, I thought the Nyquil had enough alcohol to stop me from shaking.” She explained as she started to cry. We helped her outside to the dirty hallway and onto our stretcher. We kept her awake until we arrived at the hospital but by the time we moved her to the hospital bed her eyelids were sluggish, and her limbs were weak. In the ER room, the nurse took one look at her and said, “She was just here yesterday for the same thing.”


   Later that same week we would run another call there, just a few doors down from the woman who drank the Nyquil. Making our way into another crowded, one-room flat straight from the Honeymooners set, a woman in her mid-thirties sat in a bathtub slightly filled with water. A hairdryer still plugged into the wall, lay at the bottom of the tub near the drain. She drew her knees up to her chest as more of our faces appeared in the doorway. Reaching out, a hand unplugged the blow dryer from the outlet. Another hand extended down towards her, “Ma’am, let’s get you out of there.” She stepped out of the grey water and onto the filthy bath mat. Her wet hair clung to her face, hiding most of her features. “It didn’t fucking work.” She sobbed as she crossed her arms around her shivering, raw and defenseless body. Stepping forward through the group, a female police officer put an arm around the woman’s shoulders. “Why don’t we get you some dry clothes.” The officer said, parting the bodies blocking the doorway, guiding her around the corner where a bed folded out of the wall creating a makeshift bedroom. The deputy began rummaging through the woman’s pile of clothes on the floor, searching for something more appropriate. The naked and trembling lady kept repeating the phrase, “it didn’t fucking work.” The police officer handed her some dry clothing and told her, “it’s going to be okay.” The young lady threw the clothes onto the floor, shooting her arms down to her waist and clenching her fists, “It’s not going to fucking be okay.” she screamed.  We wrapped her in a blanket and, exhausted, she collapsed onto our stretcher. 
     
   As the weather warmed up I thought maybe we’d catch a break from suicide attempts. Posted near the beach one afternoon, my partner and I had fallen asleep while watching an episode of Blue Planet narrated by David Attenborough. The sound of the ocean and the narrator’s voice immediately lulled us into slumber. I tied myself in a knot with the seatbelt as the sound of dispatch giving us a call launched me from my catnap. We were being sent to the pier for a possible water rescue. We met the fire department in the parking as they were bringing the patient to us, unconscious on the back of their skid unit. Once she was loaded into the ambulance, there were enough hands on deck for me to remain outside for a minute.  I asked one of the park rangers what happened, and he eagerly pointed toward the pier filled with vacationing sightseers.“When we got to her she was still awake, she said she took a bunch of pills and jumped off the pier to kill herself, but the tide is coming in pretty hard and it basically just washed her right back up on the shore.” She overdosed and threw herself into the ocean only to be spat back out. It has to be unbelievably sad when no part of this planet wants you. 
 
       With the opium epidemic in full swing across the country, our county can be counted among the worst affected. The last shipment of junk to hit our shore was a bad batch. The users die in traffic, slumped over the steering wheel at the traffic light. They die in the shittiest of hotel rooms, bent forward in a cheap wooden chair, purple from the waist to the head, needle still in their arms. They die in the smallest of living quarters littered with garbage, sprawled and stiff on the floor while the television blares some reality talk show. They die face down in the dirt behind abandoned buildings. They die in the alleyways in piles of waste, deserted by their junkie friends who were lucky enough to survive the hotshot. If we're fortunate enough to save one of them, they are never grateful to be alive. They're always resentful that we've pulled them away from their slumber to rejoin the living. They prefer the comfort of the grave to this cold reality and most of the time I can't blame them. At some point during our shift, I dressed our stretcher in the hallway in front of the ICU at the hospital. The sliding glass door to the room was closed but I could hear the conversation taking place beyond the doorway. A man cried as he pleaded with the doctor for answers. I heard a voice tell the man that his wife had overdosed on phenobarbital and there was nothing more that could be done. “Can I just hold her hand?” the man asked.
 I heard a door close and a cold silence crept out of the room and into the corridor. Only a pane of frosted glass separated me and the sound of a person weeping.

  Figuring we were responding to another overdose, we pulled up to a car in the middle of a dead end street. The driver's door hung open, and a woman's leg bent outward, touching the asphalt with the tip of her shoe. Behind the wheel, with her head on her shoulder and her mouth open, snoring and passed out drunk, was a woman in her mid-forties resting comfortably. Once we were able to wake her up, she became angry and combative, spitting and cursing. She fought us as we tried to pull her out of the vehicle and at some point during our wrestling match, she managed to grab my nipple. I screamed in pain and the scene came to halt with everyone looking at the patient with my teat squeezed between her thumb and index finger. In the middle of the silence, I made eye contact with my assailant, her lips curled back and she snarled, "I'm gonna fuck you in the ass." I don't care for confrontation and I care even less for unsolicited human contact, and in that awkward face to face moment, the only thing my brain could muster was to shout, "Let go of my nipple, I have a wife." Our patient began to snicker, releasing her grip on my chest, as everyone else busted out into laughter. My partner put her hand on my shoulder and nodded her head in a knowing fashion.

On Sunday my partner and I were first on scene for a cardiac arrest. A 46-year-old female had fallen asleep on her couch after having a few beers and watching TV in her trailer. According to witnesses who were there and had smoked weed with her earlier, she had passed out and then suddenly woke up, contorted, grabbed her chest, gasped for air, urinated, and then fell onto the floor. We arrived to find one person over her attempting CPR while talking to 911, phone pressed between their shoulder and ear. I dropped our heart monitor near her head and began compressing her chest. My first compression broke her xiphoid and my second broke her ribs. Our monitor read asystole and I continued compressions while my partner applied the pads and began intubation. Fire rescue arrived on scene in about two minutes and began assisting with the administration of meds while I continued to push on her chest. We stopped at some point for a rhythm check, we all stared at the monitor screen, searching for a pulse. I heard someone yell, "clear!" as the monitor delivered the first shock. Her body contorted on the floor and then relaxed. I continued compressing her chest. I looked at her face, tongue hanging out of her mouth, her pupils fixed and dilated, color fading from her skin, I so desperately wanted her to wake up. A rookie EMT with fire rescue took over compressions and I took over ventilations. We shocked her 7 times, drilled an IO, administered 6 doses of Epi, 2 doses of Amiodarone, 1 dose of Narcan (she was a known opiate addict), and 30 mins of CPR before we obtained ROSC. "We got a pulse!" I heard my partner yell. I looked at her chest and let go of the BVM. "She's breathing!" I said as I saw her chest finally rise. We moved her to the stretcher, loaded her into the ambulance, and I hit lights and sirens as I sped off to the hospital.
    After we transferred care over to hospital staff we all sat in the EMS lounge collecting our thoughts and giving our perspectives on the call. We talked about the scene in the trailer and how she had urinated on the couch before hitting the floor. I leaned against the counter stirring my coffee, "yeah, good thing it was all on the couch," I said.  I saw the rookie look up from his comfortable spot on the lounge floor. "Wait...she pissed on the couch?" he asked, puzzled. "Yeah, you didn't see that big wet spot on the cushion?" his partner asked. "Fuck! I knew I sat in something wet!" he said. He had sat on the couch while drilling the IO. "Dude, you're not getting back in the engine like that, go get a towel or some shit to wrap around you." his partner told him. The rookie left and returned with a hospital sheet wrapped around his waist. My partner took one look, pointed at him, and said, "you look like the Tinkle Fairy!" and all of us joined in the mockery, pointing, laughing, and espousing the phrase, "Tinkle Fairy!"  Our laughter was interrupted by the charge nurse opening the lounge door, leaning in, and saying, "She still has a pulse. Good job, guys." The door clicked shut behind him. I stirred my coffee again, starring into the caffeine void. "Yeah, good job, Tinkle Fairy." I heard the rookie's partner say as we all fell back into laughter. 

Monkey Business

A few days ago some one I work with asked me, "So is Planet of the Apes based on a true story or some shit?" I looked at him for a moment waiting for the laughter to start. He was serious.
I said, "No, it's not."
He nodded his head that he understood and said, "So it's fictional..."