Rick asked me if I was mad. I said no and polished off the rest of beer #2. He asked me what was up.
"I'm trying to get this woman's screams out of my head," I said, staring blankly at his knee. "I want to drink enough so that I stop hearing her voice."
Rick looked around at the other people in the room and muttered, "O...Oh, Okay."
We had started the morning with back-to-back cardiac arrests.
The first one was on the 16th floor of a luxury apartment building for the faculty of a local university. On the ground was a one-legged man, surrounded by fire fighters actually doing CPR. It was both surprising and impressive.
I ripped off the fire dept's automated defibrillator pads and replaced them with my own. "Don't touch!" I said, pointing to the man. i waited for the monitor to show a perfect, uninterrupted flatline, then hit the print button
"Ok, continue CPR," I nodded.
My partner got out the IV setup as I pulled out the tube kit.
The intubation was no problem., but my partner was having a hard time with the IV.
We put the first round of drugs down the tube. And then the second. And then the third.
By now, the tube was overflowing with liquid, a frothy mix of blood, mucus, and Epi. My partner prepared the stretcher, implying that we would take the man to the hospital. I shook my head vigorously and reached into the medication bag for a small, twenty-two gauge needle. I found a small vein on the inside of the man's right wrist. I hit it on my first shot.
"Get me an Epi, would ya?" I asked my partner, smiling triumphantly.
As I finished pushing an amalgam of medications to no avail, my partner looked at me. "I'm gonna get on the phone," he said.
I nodded. The phone meant Bicarb, and Bicarb meant the end was near. He walked into an adjoining room with the phone to his ear.
I rechecked the monitor and took off my gloves. Nada. I wiped my hands like Pontius Pilate and started picking up trash. Dirty needles were the biggest worry, and after that it was the used medication vials. A fire fighter followed me around with a red trash bag.
"Well, it's been fun," I laughed, patting him on the shoulder.
Just then, the man's sister arrived. She fell to the floor next to him, screaming. "C'mon you bastard, get up! Get up!" she pounded her fists on the floor. "Live...live you bastard!"
Needless to say, her arrival was a major buzzkill.
My partner returned rubbing his hands together like a boy at Christmas. "Two Bicarb and call him back in five minutes," he announced.
His smile disappeared when he saw the woman on the floor.
"You bastard!" she howled. "You can't die! You can't leave without me! You bastard, you can't die! Live you bastard. Live!" Her cries gradually morphed into an incomprehensible jumble of sobs and injunctions.
The EMT continued with chest compressions and our student kept bagging. I continued to gather our things, which had been scattered about in the initial rush to save the man's life. No one would make eye contact with woman who now had her brother's hand in her own and was caressing it vigorously. We pretended to ignore her and the result was a bizarre, stiltled normalcy. The EMT pushed down on the man's chest and the student squeezed the BVM and the woman sobbed. And sobbed. And sobbed.
My partner returned. "The time is 1036," he said.
The EMT stopped CPR and I hit the print button one last time. Our student kept squeezing the BVM--a glossed-over look had overtaken her face. I pulled the EKG wires off the man with a single yank.
"What's going on?" asked the woman, bewildered.
"He's dead," I said, eyeballing our student. The fire fighter with the red trash bag approached her and she looked up at me, still squeezing the BVM. I nodded. Slowly and seemingly in disbelief, she disconnected the dirty BVM and placed it in the bag.
The woman threw herself on top of her brother, clutching his lifeless body. "You lived a good life, goddamnit. You bastard, you left without me! You left me all alone! You left me, you bastard!" She grabbed her brother by his shoulders and shook him as she said this. "Do you hear me? You bastard, you can't be dead. You can't."
I picked up the monitor and left like I was fleeing the scene of a crime. No double-checking to make sure I had everything. No goodbye. No "Sorry for your loss." I just wanted out of that room, out of that apartment, out of that sadness. I wanted fresh air and fresh clothes. I wanted to be somewhere else. I wanted a drink, a laugh. Something to get her voice, her screams out of my head, out of my mind, out of me.
To be continued...
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