Flatline: NYC

The Prisoner

It hurt to watch. The Sergeant pulled the trigger, electrifying the man again. His body tensed and shit poured out of his ass, filling his pants.

"Put your hands behind your back!" yelled the Seargant. "Put your hands behind your back!"

And quickly, obediently, the man did.

We had been called for an "Injury" at the 15th Precint. A black man in his late twenties was pacing about a jail cell. Dried fecal matter ran from the toilet. Sweat glistened on his brow.

The cop pulled me aside before we went inside the jail. "Look man, this is a real interesting guy," he said. "He's says he doesn't know if he got bit or stabbed with an icepick in his back."

"Uh hu," I nodded. "Right."

As we approached, several cops escorted us to the man's cell. He was alone in the jail, stuck behind steel bars.

I asked him what's wrong.

"I think someone bit me last night, or maybe they stabbed me with an icepick."

"Oh," I said, "an icepick? Why do you think that?"

"I visualized it," he explained, lifting up his shirt.

There was no stab wound, just a minor scrape not even breaking the skin. I broke the news. The man let his shirt drop.

"Someone put poison in my food," he said. "It's in my stomach, it's been like that all day."

Right.

Once we broke the news, the man explained that he didn't want to go to the hospital. He was sweating a lot, which wasn't a good sign, and alcohol was on breath. Not only that, but we didn't have any vitals on him. I--for one--didn't want to get that close.

"EMS says your fine," barked the Seargant. "You still want to go to the hospital?"

"If they say I don't need to go," the man shrugged, "then I don't need to go."

I glanced over at my partner. It was a dicey refusal. We had no vitals. The man had alcohol and probably drugs in his system. But he had no stab wound and I really wanted to go back to sleep, so I gave him the piece of paper and put an X where he should sign.

The man pulled the paper away and--surprisingly--read it. "I ain't releasing nobody or 'their representatives' from liability," he shouted.

"Dude, if you don't sign on the line, you're going to the hospital, it's that simple," I explained.

The man signed.

As we walked out, he started yelling again and began banging on the prison bars, creating a loud noise. "I want my copy!" he yelled.

I turned to the cop next to me. "He doesn't get a copy," I muttered.

The Sergeant turned around, marching back to the man. "You don't get a copy, and you will not make a rucus in my jail. Do you understand me? Do you understand?" he shouted.

The noise stopped.

Just as we were out the front door, the clanging started again. Uh oh, I said, turning to my partner. This is gonna be interesting.

"Alright, that's it!" The seargent reached into a drawer and pulled out a yellow stun-gun called a Taser. Quickly, he inserted a new battery-pack and depressed the trigger. A sharp, crackling sound of electricity filled the police station.

"Oh, I gotta see this!" one of the cops exlaimed, overcome with excitement.

A gaggle of officers followed the Sergeant as almost everyone in the precint looked on.

"I want one officer to come with me," commanded the Sergeant. "EMS, standby."

The clanging continued.

The Sergeant approached the man. "What did I tell you? What the hell is your problem, son? What the fuck do you think you are doing?" he yelled. After a minute or two of booming commands, the clanging stopped and the Sergeant walked back out.

The was a palpable air of dissapointment in the station. "All that and I got a hard-on for nothing," said one cop, shaking his head.

We left for the ambulance again.

Then it happened, quieter now this time: Clang. Clang.

"Alright, that's it!" bellowed the Sergeant, storming back to the jail. "I told you that if you make one more noise, we're gonna have a big problem. Now we've got a problem!" The Sergeant squared himself toward the man, raising the Taser gun. An officer unlocked the cell. "Put your hands behind your back." commanded the Sergeant.

"But I was just..."

"Place your hands behind your back," he repeated, his voice steady.

"But..."

Pop.

The Taser fired two electrified darts into the man's chest. Connected to the gun by two wires, the electrical discharge lasted for five-seconds. The high-pitched crackle of electrcity filled the jail. Cops jumped over each other to see what was happening. The man fell forward, his body becoming stiff. "Ahh! Oww! Make it stop!" he pleaded.

"I think he just shit himself," my partner said, turning to me. I nodded.

"Place your hands behind your back," repeated the Sergeant.

The man hesitated, opening his mouth to say something.

The crackling sound returned, and his body became stiff again. He was silent this time.

"Place your hands behind your back," said the Sergeant again.

Quietly--the electricity still pulsing through his body--the man followed the Sergeant's command. Two officers cuffed him, placing shackles on his arms and legs. One cop turned to another. "Wow," he said, "now I've got a whole new level of respect for Night Sergeant." The other nodded in agreement, watching with glee.

They pulled the prisoner to his feet, making him face the Sergeant. "You feel like a real man now, don't ya?" said the prisoner. "Don't worry, I won't forget what you did to me. I won't forget. Time will come. You'll get yours. In a dark alley somewhere, you'll get yours."

My partner and I ran to grab the stretcher. As we wheeled the man out, two women who looked like prostitutes gazed on. "They know what you did to me! The man shot me when I was in handcuffs. He shot me!" the prisoner hollered, unceasing as we slid him into the ambulance. "When I come back. you're going to have to shoot me again! You'll get yours, trust me, you'll get yours!"

I started filling out paperwork in the back of the ambulance. A cop was with us in the back. He looked down at the prisoner, shaking his head, sounding a little sorry. "You know all of that was unneccesary. It didn't have to happen that way."

"Any allergies?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, staring at the cop, "pork. You know, swine."

My partner turned back to me from the driver's seat. "How about a little music?"

When I was just a baby,
My Mama told me, "Son,
Always be a good boy,
Don't ever play with guns,"
But I shot a man in Reno,
Just to watch him die,
When I hear that whistle blowin',
I hang my head and cry.

"Sing it!" I said, turning to the prisoner. "You like Johnny Cash, don't ya?"

He returned a quizocal look. "Who?"

I turned back to my partner. "Try another one," I hollered. "I want to do a sing-a-long."

"Ok," he said, fumbling with the radio. "How about this one?"

Breakin’ rocks in the hot sun
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won
I needed money ’cause I had none
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and...

"C'mon, sing it!" I said, repeating the words. "C'mon, man..." I eyed the officer, "sing it with me."

And so we strolled into the ER, singing softly and all together. "I fought the law and the law won, I fought the law and the law won..."

The Happy Family

The woman was on a bed, unconscious, foaming at the mouth.

I shook my head, trying to get it on straight.

"Umm, what's going on?" I asked.

The woman's daughter was scrambling around the apartment, desperately searching for her mother's medications. She's a diabetic, she said.

Then the arguing started.

A man in his twenties walked into the room. He was shirtless. From his ribcage hung an abundance of fat, collected in large rolls, some marked by strange bruises, as though he couldn't turn a corner without one of the rolls swinging up into the air and striking a table, a chair, or a payphone. And his breasts, oh his breasts, they sagged down almost to the bottom of his ribs, each terminating in a dark, round pancake of a nipple. It was hard to imagine him with his shirt on, hair in cornrows, strutting down the street and lookin' tough.

"I don't want to go to no hospital," he moaned, throwing down his arms.

His sister shot back, "I can't believe you're so selfish, Tyrone."

Amidst all this tertiary drama was the woman, now seizing. I rubbed my eyes, both wishing I hadn't drank so much the day before and half-glad the apartment was so poorly lit. My partner started the paperwork as I searched for a vein. I tried the AC. Nothing. I tried the hand. Nothing.

She was on her 3rd seizure when I decided to hit her in the shoulder with Glucagon, or "the sugar stuff," as my ever-so-brilliant partner referred to it.

Just in case you don't know, Dextrose, a.k.a. "D50", is sugar. Glucagon is a hormone that makes your body release sugar. But that's just a minor detail.

As we prepared to move the woman, another family member showed up. It was her husband. He was trying to buckle his belt using a steak knife. Whatever, I thought, it's New York City. Maybe it's a black thing.

It's not. It's a drunk thing.

Anyway, it was 9am and this woman's husband was totally smashed. I mean, he was so retarded that I figured he must have been on smack or sniffing glue or something. His daughter would yell at him, scream at him, and he would just stand there, yellow beanie falling off, staring ahead, a lost expression on his face

I wondered what it would be like to have such a man as a father.

Bitch Tits declared again that he didn't want to go to the hospital. His father stood there, unmoved, staring down at the knife in his hands. The daughter bustled around, gathering clothes for the trip to the hospital.

She grabbed my hand, pulling it away from her mother's abdomen. "Don't touch her stomach too hard, she's got something there, I can feel it." She touched her mother gently. "It's like it's moving around. If you press on it, you'll make her have a seizure again."

Oh, the innocence.

It's not her stomach that's making her have the seizure, I explained. It's that her blood sugar is too low.

She looked me warily, eyeing my hands.

The woman grew more alert as we flopped her onto the stretcher. At first she was just speaking gibberish, but after a few minutes hen she started babbling on about Medicaid.

Her daughter, poor thing, was taken in by this, and that's what I didn't understand. Clearly, this kind of thing happened all the time, and her daughter still didn't get the drill. Yes. She passes out. She has seizures. We give her something, her blood sugar goes up. At first she babbles. Then she gets agitated. Then—after a long while—she relaxes.

But the daughter was sucked in. She yells at Bitch Tits for being selfish. She yells at her dad for being drunk. I wondered why she let herself get caught up in the drama.

Maybe it was that she cared. I had forgotten what that looked like.

Either way, her disquiet was nothing compared to the voice of her mother.

"I was a police officer for twenty years!" she cried out. "All those people tried to kill me. And now you! You get away from me, so help me god," she glared at the empty eyes of her husband, "You fucking drunk."

In the ambulance, I sat quietly in the corner as the woman berated the man, occasionally glancing over my shoulder to see how close we were to the hospital.

Paperwork—I was doing paperwork—and what they had, their problem, I could not fix.

“I worked in a prison for twenty years!” she cried again, her voice growing more violent. “I’m gonna end up dead because of you, you fucking drunk! You fucking drunk!”

Her eyes smoldered as she stared his face. It was vacant, like a junkie’s. A stream of tears slid down the woman's cheek.

I glanced at the two of them and stepped out of the ambulance.

Ahh, I thought, spring is almost here.

Quicksilver Tears

I picked up his body and rolled it over. His face and chest had turned purple, the result of lying there for so long. And by that, I mean a few hours. I pulled out my stethoscope to listen for heartbeat as I had been trained to do. I heard something, maybe it was the crackling of my stethoscope on his T-shirt. Maybe it was the echo of my own heartbeat, adrenaline still pumping.

I doubted myself not only because I was excited by the situation and surprised that the man was dead, but because he looked so obviously dead, the purple on his face and hands a sign known as post-mortem lividity. I also know I'd look stupid if I said something and it was a false alarm.

Lisa turned to the man's girlfriend. "He's dead," she proclaimed. "Muerte."

The woman began screaming and fell to the floor.

Without uttering a word, I patched the man up to the monitor and looked at the screen. His EKG was a perfect flatline. A slight wave of relief came over me as I hit the print button.

"What the hell are you doing?" asked Lisa.

"Oh," I said, "I just wanted to confirm..."

"Here, give me that," commanded Lisa, grabbing the EKG printout from my hand. "This goes in the trash."

I furrowed my brow. "But..." Looking around, I stopped myself, deciding that it was not the time for debate. And besides, she was doing the paperwork, so it wasn't really my place to tell her what to write or record. I mean, it was, but in this case, I'd ask her later.

The woman collected herself into a more organizaed version of panic. She pushed past us and climbed on top of the man's body. She lifted his limp, lifeless head to breast and cried out.

"No Papi! No! No Papi! Why? Why?"

The tears ran like quicksilver down her cheeks, falling fast off her chin.

A ray of stale light came in from the outside world, illuminating the vacant features of his face. His jaw was still clenched tight, tongue jutting out between his teeth, making us believe that he had had a seizure just before he died.

He had last been seen in bed at 3 hours prior. Then, someone knocked on the door, and there he was, face down on the floor, dead as doornail.

It was just another cold day in New York City. Another man dies. Another woman cries. And I go home to hang out with the guys.

Dad

I was wrestling on a frozen sidewalk with a psychotic senior citizen from Albania as the sun broke the horizon. It was dawn, a really cold, rosy-fingered dawn. The man, having been lured outside of the his house by an EMT wielding a cigarette, sat down on the pavement and refused to move as he clenched a match between his teeth, trying to light it with a cigarette. It was good that we got him away from the knives.

At first, I thought he was just crazy. But according to his sons, he had never acted this way before. He was a normal guy, maybe in his early sixties. And then I noticed the sweat gathering on his brow. There was a lot of sweat.

Pinning his arm to the ground, I stabbed a needle into his left shoulder, injecting him with Glucagon, a pancreatic hormone used to raise a person's blood sugar. He was diabetic, of course, but even though I hit him with the Glucagon, I didn't think that was the problem. He wasn't acting like a combative diabetic in Insulin shock. He was too coherent, too deliberate, too bizarre.

The devil has my soul, he screamed, speaking in Albanian.

Yes sirree, I thought, I believe he does.

In the  back of the bus, after one of the EMTs and myself tied the man down, I started a line. We gave him Dextrose and Thiamine to no avail. He kept sweating, soaking himself. Okay, time to go, I said, getting uncomfortable with the man's apparent deterioration. 

What the hell was wrong with this guy, I wondered. An electrolyte imbalance? An intercranial bleed?

At the hospital, he calmed down a bit. The doctors were equally puzzled.

Outside, it started to snow. I stepped into the cold air, watching the snowflakes fall, and wondered where my father was, how he was doing, and why I hadn't called him in a week.

the best job in the world

There is a tendency in EMS--at least in urban areas--for paramedics to diminish the importance of our work. I mean, don't get me wrong, we deal with a lot of nonsense, but still, it's not all bullshit.

Take today.

My plan was to come home and write a funny story about heroin addict we saved. The man shouted at us indignantly, "You didn't give me Narcan, did you?"

Well, in fact we did.

The man left the ER minutes after we arrived.

Note to self: don't do mouth-to-mouth on a junkie, even if you're alone. They don't deserve it.

But then we picked up an old guy with asthma. He didn't speak much English, and for that matter, he couldn't say a whole lot given his level of distress.

We hit him with the whole kit & capoodle: Albuterol x 4, 2 grams of Mag, and 125mg of Solu-Medrol. (For those of you who don't know, that's a fairly aggressive asthma treatment regimine). By the time we got to the ER, he didn't even need oxygen or his breathing treatment.

His daughter, who spoke broken English, thanked us profusely.

I smiled as I did the paperwork. There's this feeling, you know, when you feel like you really did the right thing. I didn't have to get on the phone and call for Mag or Solu-Medrol. I could have just taken him to the hospital, ya know, he would have lived. But he needed the good shit, he needed what we could give.

It was just so...so gratifying to see this guy 180. I mean, we fixed him, we did it.

The doctors in the ER give the orders. The nurses execute them. But me, I get to do both. I use my brain and my hands.

Last week one of the docs at work asked if I was thinking of med school. Nope, I said, what I'm doing no is my favorite part of medicine. I mean, being a doc would be cool, but you're not as directly involved in patient care. I mean, sometimes you are. But it's not your job to provide for the whole of the patient's needs. Doctors are the brains, nurses are the heart, but paramedics get to have both.

I mean, I'm young man, and EMS is a young man's profession. But still, I love my job. I love the fact that I get to make decisions--I mean, we're talking real decisions here, life or death shit--and then I get to execute them. It's just so damn gratifying.

In my other life, I am trying to be a writer. It's a cerebral world, ya know, but when I am here, at work, I feel present, I feel alive in way that I don't in anything else I do. I lose myself in medicine, and that...that is the best feeling in the world.

Mommy, part 2

You could hear him screaming from the street outside. "Mommy! Mommy! Waa! Waa!"

The cops were a few steps ahead of us.

Inside, a large, 270 lb. teenage boy was screaming. His mother was crying. One of the cops tried to calm him down. "Sir, you need to calm down!" he explained, motioning downwards with his hands.

The boy continued to scream. His mother, still crying, reached over to him. In return, the boy threw a right hook, barely missing her chin. The cops tackled him, throwing him into the wall.

I grabbed the woman by the shirt and pulled her outside. As she watched her son get handcuffed by the police, tears ran down her face and she prayed the Hail Mary in Spanish.

"Mommy! Mommy!" he wailed. "It hurts mommy! It hurts!"

The boy had autism, the mother explained, and she did her best to take care of him. Lifting up her left hand, she explained to us that he had bit her finger last week, almost tearing it off.

He was a big boy, completely out of control.

A thin trail of blood ran down his left cheek, terminating at the base of his chin. There, the blood dried, forming brown splotches. The cops had shown surprising restraint, I thought, only applying force enough to restrain him, no more. Outside, the boulevard took notice as we brought him out on the stretcher.

"Mommy! Mommy!" he wailed, his cried echoing down the street. "It hurts mommy! It hurts!"

In the back of the ambulance, he began to kick and rock forth violently. People peered into the ambulance as I sat myself on his knees, tying his ankles to the stretcher with gauze. His mom peered into the back, still crying.

I cinched the last knot as my partner put the ambulance into gear. "It's okay, papi." I said, getting off his knees. "It's okay."

He rocked back and forth, still crying out.

I dimmed the lights and put my hand on his head, stroking it. "It's okay. It's okay. It's okay," I repeated softly.

The city rushed by as we sped down dark, crowded streets. Men and women walked about, oblivious to the boy's vacant screams. His eyes glowed with absentminded pain, his voice unceasing. The cop leaned back, motioning to me.

"I just feel sorry for his mother," he said. "She's getting her ass kicked."

I nodded in agreement. The boy needed to be put in a home, we commiserated. It wasn't doing him any good to be with her, sad as it may be.

I look back at him again, never ceasing to stroke his hair, and began to sing. "Rock-a-bye baby on the treetop..hmm-hm-hmm-hu-hmm-hu-hmm...when the wind blows, the cradle will rock.."

I didn't actually know all the words, so I hummed the parts I didn't know.

"Mommy. Mommy." He said, his cry growing softer.

The cop looked on, amused.

"Hmm-hm-hmm-hu-hmm-hu-hmm...the cradle will fall.." I crooned softly, always petting his head.

As we pulled into the hospital, he grew silent. My partner had called ahead, notifying the hospital of our arrival. I wondered if my magical calming would make us look stupid, that perhaps I had done too good a job in calming the boy. But as soon as we pulled him out of the ambulance, he roused again.

"Mommy! Mommy!" he screamed with a renewed shrillness as we stepped inside the ER. "Take it off Mommy! IT HURTS MOMMY! IT HURTS!"

A line of patients and paramedics watched, mouth agape, as we walked past the triage desk and into the bowels of the ER.

As we prepared to put the boy onto their stretcher, the staff psychiatrist approached. I think he needs to be chemically restrained, I said, meaning that the boy needed something to sedate him.

"No," he proclaimed, "I don't think that will be neccesary. He is calling for his mother. He obviously just wants to be with her. And we need to take those handcuffs off, they are hurting him."

The cop and I glanced at each other.

"Umm, Doc." I said. "I don't think that's such a good idea. On scene he tried to clock his mom in the face and last week he almost bit her thumb off. He really needs to be knocked down with some Ativan."

"No, No," the doctor waved me off, letting his hand linger dangerously close to the boy's mouth. "We just need to talk and to reason with him. He'll listen."

"Whatever you want to do, Doc." I shook my head. "As long as he's on your stretcher..."

We moved the boy to their stretcher. He began fighting instantly, nearly striking the psychiatrist with his foot. The cops reluctantly uncuffed the boy at the doctor's order. For ten minutes, he tried reason with him as staff struggled to hold him down. I shook my head.

"Fucking idiot." I said, staring at the doctor.

Walking away, I was surprised to find the boy's mother again. She was still upset.

"I've never had to call the cops before," she stuttered, wiping away tears. "He threw me down to the ground last week."

"You can't take care of him anymore." I explained, rubbing her shoulder. "You're gonna get killed."

"I know. I know," she cried.

I left her to be with her son. As I stepped out into the ambulance bay, I could still hear his cries in behind me. The sky was growing dark, and buildings poured dark smoke from their rooftops into the violet haze. "Mommy! Mommy!" the boy screamed. "Mommy, I hate you! I hate you Mommy!"

Mommy, part 1

His screams reminded me of another kid I once cared for.

I remember the other boy: he weighed scarcely 70 pounds at age nineteen. The boy would have seizures every so often, and when we would pick him up, he would scream this blood-curling, miserable scream. It was so pained, so helpless, so...oh god, just make it stop.

The boy's family had left him in a nursing home in the hope that he would die soon and out of sight, at least that's what I figured. I never saw them. All I knew was their address, which was enough: they had money, and lots of it. After picking the kid up a few times, I made a habit of jutting my head into the front of the ambulance on the way to the hospital and telling my partner to drive as fast as possible.

I couldn't take it. I just, I couldn't take the sound, the gut-wrenching, sad sound, the solemn wailing, the agonized shrieks of empty, lonely pain. Of all the things I'd seen, of all the shootings, all the abused children and beat-up mothers, of all the dead and all the dying, this kid, this one, miserable, decrepit teenager was the one I couldn't handle.

My mother was bipolar. When I was a kid, she would wake up at 3am and scream these terrible, ear piercing screams. We all felt sorry for the neighbors because we knew they could hear it and that it must have bothered them, that it must have chilled their soul to hear. When I was a little, I would run to her, I would try to help her and make it all better. It worked sometimes, but the fix was fleeting, even then I knew that.

It was the memories of those years, the shrouded association of scream with scream and the subsequent displaced pain that the boy evoked. Those screams readied me for this life, for the madness of the streets. They steeled me, made me hard and cool in the face of grief, pain and psychosis alike. But every once in a while, something--like the screaming--reminds of that past which tempered me, and I am shaken by it.

Sometimes, I just, I just want to make it stop, please god, make it stop.

the dead

A man died today, or maybe two weeks ago. But at 5:12pm, I made it official.

His pants were off, of course, and his hair was long and neatly styled. At first, I thought he was wearing nylons because his legs were so smooth. He had sumptuous breasts and an attractive figure.

He was in his mid-thirties, sitting--head curled--on the couch in his bedroom. Pictures of attractive, made-up women lined the walls. His skin had turned a greenish hue and was beginning to slough off. His penis was smooth and hairless. It hung, forlorn, drooped between two legs.

The neighbors called because blood was dripping from the ceiling.

I was working with Lisa, but the Angry Black Man was there too--picking up overtime on a BLS tour.

"You need to cut off a piece of his skin and attach it to the call report," he said, sounding nonchalant "it's in the protocols."

I laughed, knowing he was joking.

I had never seen someone who'd been so dead for so long before. I wasn't sure what to do exactly. Should I perform an exam? Check for a pulse? Part of me wanted to. I was afraid that somehow, someway, he wasn't dead and I'd get in trouble for pronouncing him. But I would have been laughed at had I done more than look at him, I knew that. So I pronounced him, observing only his stillness.

I laughed at the pool of dark liquid--perhaps blood--on the floor. I laughed at the man's breasts. I laughed at his bloated stomach and his smooth skin. I laughed because, to be honest, I didn't know how to feel, exactly. Was the man murdered? I don't know. His bedroom was well kept and there were no signs of a struggle. Did he kill himself? Maybe. But why were his pants down?

ABM was grumbling about how he had left his digital camera at home.

I chuckled as I filled out the report. Who was this guy, I wondered. What happened? What was his name.

Lisa suggested we fill out the paperwork downstairs. As we reached the bottom floor in the elevator, several children jumped into the elevator before we got out. A man was with them.

"Did you come for my brother?" he asked.

"3F?" I said, referring to the apartment.

"Yeah," he said, looking down to the ground. "I've been knocking on his door for a week."

"Oh," I said, searching for comforting words. "You should talk to the police."

I walked out into a cold, stiff wind. Trash was blowing in the air. I felt a chill and watched as the wind blew black garbage bags and empty styrofoam cups down the street. They dispersed them into the Bronx night, and I followed them, still wondering what the hell had happened,

True Love

The man shuffled slowly to the door, dragging his right foot. Opening it, he invited us in.

As he cracked the door, I could the man. He man had on a white shirt, neatly pressed, as though it had been meant for a tie. His back was bowed forward, as though he carried an invisible weight.

"What's going..." I asked, pausing midsentence.

As the door opened further, an old woman came into view. She was lying on the floor, naked and listless. Her dark features stood out against a backdrop of pink bedsheets.

"What the hell happened?" asked Lisa, squinting as she turned her head to one side.

I grabbed the monitor and the drug bag, stepping past the man.

"She fell off the bed," he explained. "I think she hit her head."

"Uh hu..." I said, nodding quizically. "I see."

The woman lay on a faded tile floor, her body drenched in a pond of urine. Notebooks, old medicine bottles, and half-eaten bags of Dorritos littered the floor around her. She felt cold.

"HELLO?" I called out, rubbing my knuckles into her chest. She recoiled slightly, moving her arms.

"I'm going to go get a backboard," said Lisa, handing me an IV setup. "You gonna be okay?"

"Yeah. Sure," I said. "I'll be fine."

As Lisa walked out of the room, I turned to the man. "What sort of medical problems does she have?" I asked.

"Umm..." he stammered in a slow, drawn out sort of way. "I hope I the right thing. I hope...Diabetes. I think she has Diabetes...I wasn't sure if I should call you."

"You did the right thing, sir." I said, trying to reassure him as I searched the woman's arm for a vein. "How long has she been like this?"

"Ohh...umm..." he shuffled forward, bringing a white hand to his blanched lips. "I think twenty, maybe thirty minutes."

"I...I see," I said, sliding an IV catheder into the old woman's arm. "Why did you wait so long to call?"

"I wasn't...I wasn't sure," he stammered slowly, his face turning from white to red.

After securing the IV, I prepped an amp of Dextrose. Pushing it into the vein, I rubbed on the woman's chest again. "Carmen," I said, "Carmen! IT'S TIME TO WAKE UP! I've got lunch here for ya. It's a ham sandwich in IV form. C'mon now. Wake up!"

"She doesn't speak any English," the man offered, reaching out his right hand.

"Ohh...Okay." I muttered, my brow furrowing. "Do you speak any Spanish?"

"No," he shook his head. "I don't."

"Right." I proclaimed, nodding blankly.

Just then, Lisa walked in with the backboard.

"Is Carmen your girlfriend?" I asked the old man.

"Yes," he nodded.

"Right," I nodded again, looking back up at him. "Right. " The truth dawned on me.

Lisa and I placed Carmen on the backboard, affixing a hard collar to her neck. After the Dextrose--the ham sandwich, as it were--she started to come around.

"Estoy frio," she muttered, shivering violently.

We covered her with a blanket as we made our way out to the ambulance. The old man stayed at home.

Carmen--the old woman--was fully conscious by the time we arrived at the hospital.

As we wheeled her through the door, I whispered in her ear. "Esta hombre en tu casa es tu novio?"

"Si," she said, still trembling uncontrollably.

"What's the story?" asked the doc.

Lisa pointed at me.

"Well," I said, "you're never going to believe this, but she was having sex with..."

"Wha??" the doctor quieried.

"You know," I explained, making a crude gesture with my hand, "doing the nasty." As I explained the story, a crowd of young doctors gathered. When I finished, they stood in stunned silence.

"Anything else?" the doctor asked, still blinking his eyes.

"Oh yeah," I said, flashing a smile. "She doesn't speak any English and her boyfriend doesn't speak any Spanish."

High Five

I took a few minutes to get out of the ambulance.

Fuck, I thought, another sick person. This is why I never work BLS.

My partner and I were both exhausted. I hadn't had a day off in over two weeks, and here I was working overtime on an EMT ambulance, getting my ass run off with sick people and other assorted bullshit. The difference, ya see, is that as a paramedic, I only go on "high-priority" jobs where--theoretically at least--people are genuinely in need of help. EMTs get stuck with the "low-priority" jobs--the headaches and foot pains of the world. Really, BLS is the flotsam and jetsam of EMS. And it was running me into the ground.

My partner had already gone inside the building by the time I cracked open the ambulance door. I locked up and followed her inside, carrying the oxygen bag.

"What's up?" I asked the man at the front desk.

He pointed to another part of the building. My partner was kneeling down next to a man on the floor. As I approached, I noticed a small puddle next to the man's face. He was drooling profusely.

Hmf.

"They said he was feeling sick," my partner explained, reaching for the oxygen bag, "then he had a seizure."

I reached to open the man's eyelid's. His eyes were rolled back into his head and his jaw was clenched shut.

"Dude," I said, "I think he's still seizing. We better call for ALS."

ALS, by the way, is paramedics.

We slapped an oxygen mask on the guy and threw him on the stairchair (it's a chair with wheels, meant for carrying people down stairwells). My partner called for ALS.

As we wheeled the man towards to the ambulance, a Puerto Rican guy started yelling. "You fuckers are double parked. I need to get out, I can't move my car."

The man, meanwhile, was still foaming at the mouth, his body limp.

"Hey," my partner said, turning. "Did you lock the ambulance?"

"Yeah, of course." I said.

"Did you notice that it was still running?" she screamed, "and that keys are still in the ignition!"

"Oh," I rejoined bashfully. "Yeah. Umm. That's a problem."

Meanwhile, the Puerto Rican guy approached us. He had on a dirty white T-shirt and several gold chains. Chest hair curled forth from the nape of his neck. "Jou want to move your fucking ambulance?" he inquired. "I got to go see my girl and jour fucking bus blocking my way out."

I looked first at our patient, his head drooping off to one side, then again to the Puerto Rican guy. I stared at him blankly. Sirens sounded in the distance.

My partner crossed her arms, gave me a dirty look, then stared off into the distance, tapping her foot.

Our patient began sliding off the chair, hanging limply off to one side. Drool plastered his left side.

I called for a Boss to help us get back into the ambulance.

After a few minutes, the medics showed up. It was Pinky and another medic they call the Fist. They were working 6 Kilo, my normal bus.

As we put the man in their ambulance, he aroused a little, moving in starts.

"Okay, hold his arm!" commanded Pinky.

I grabbed the man's wrist as Pinky went for the IV. He nailed it. As Pinky reached the IV tubing, the man pulled hard. I threw myself onto him, pinning his upper torso against the wall.

"Do it! Do it!" I yelled, grabbing the man's elbow and pushing it in to lock it straight and decrease his leverage. The man grew violent, pulling hard and thrashing about.

Pinky taped the IV in place as the Fist drew up an IV flush.

Meanwhile, the Puerto Rican guy approached the back of the ambulance. "Jou guys gonna take forever on this fucking shit or what? What's it take to get jou fucking people to move your fucking ambulance?"

Pinky turned around. He had on a gold chain and a bulletproof vest. "Hey," he said, leaning out the back of the ambulance. "Go fuck yourself!"

Just then, a boss pulled up. The Puerto Rican guy began yelling at him too.

The Fist handed Pinky the IV flush. As he put the needle in the IV port, the man lurched. The needle came out, nearly stabbing me in the wrist.

"Sharp!" I yelled, pulling away.

Pinky put the needle back in the IV port. "I bet this guy's High Five!" he exclaimed.

The man began thrashing wildly. I grabbed his right arm, pulling it behind his head. Pinky pinned his other arm with his knee, flushing the IV with one hand, punching the man in the stomach with the other.

"Turn off the lights! Turn off the lights!" yelled the Fist as he peered out the back window to the boss standing outside.

I jumped back onto the man as Pinky threw the needle away and prepped an amp of Dextrose. He was calmed for a moment.

"What's High Five?" I asked, holding the man's arm.

"H.I.V." said Pinky, squirting little bit of Dextrose into the air.

"Oh." I stuttered. "I didn't know that."

The Boss peeked his he head into the back of the ambulance. He was a sentimentalist type. Seeing the Dextrose, he asked to administer it "for old times sake."

"Ok buddy," he said to the man, still flailing. "We're gonna give you some sugar. You're not doing so well. We're here to help you, to make you feel better."

I glanced up at Pinky. He eyed the boss strangely and with a faint look of disgust on his face.

The Boss tried to soothe the man as pushed the Dextrose, rubbing his arm and repeating calm phrases.

"Hold On!" yelled Fist from the driver's seat.

The ambulance surged forward, throwning me from the seat. The Boss spun around and fell onto the ambulance floor. Pinky meanwhile had both arms firmly planted on the ceiling rail. "Yeeeah!" he yelled.

I grabbed on the stretcher for dear life. The Boss looked slightly disheveled. "You guys...umm, could probably slow down," he peeped.

"What's that?" yelled the Fist, hitting a bump and sending us all flying again.

"You could slow down a little bit," the Boss repeated softly.

The ambulance screeched to a sudden stop--throwing us against the wall--then eeked forward at a slow pace.

"We're here!" shouted the Fist, slapping the dashboard.

The man still struggled, but to no avail: his hands were tied.

As we walked into the ER, the Boss followed, slightly pale.

It was social hour in the ER. We left our patient to himself on the gurney and approached the circle of EMTs and Paramedics. "Hey man," one of them asked. "What's going on?"

"Nothin'," said Pinky. "Just a High Fiver in Stat Ep."

We were greeted with a collective "Ohh" of recognition.

Later, Pinky approached me. "You cool with everything that went down on that call, man?" he asked.

"Yeah. Yeah." I said, "No worries. I know how it is."

"I think that sock to the gut knocked the wind out of him," he explained. "It helped a little, I think... Anyway, we should pick up a tour together sometime."

"Yeah. Definetly." I said, shaking his hand.

Back inside, the man had regained consciousness. "Hey Big Dog," I asked. "How ya doin'?"

"These ties on my wrists really hurt. Could you take them off?" he begged, sounding pathetic. I looked at him. He was confused; he didn't know what had happened. For the first time, he looked human. Miserable, but very human.

"Do you have HIV?" I asked.

"Yeah," he nodded, coffee-colored hair flailing forlornly on his head. "I do...Could you please take off these ties. They are really hurting me."