But that’s not how it was taught when I started training on the big Rescue Randy doll with the sweet spot in the centre of his chest where I always did the cleanest compressions. Rescue Randy, in his red and blue track suit, always expired the moment I stopped working on him, the tape feeding out from his monitor flatlining as soon as the trainer said to stop.
It turned out that was pretty much the way it worked in real life too.
I’d like to say I derived more satisfaction from it, that there was some point at which I clearly saved a life, that I had some kind of proof that I’d even been doing the right things. But it’s fuzzy, that line between intention and effort, between trying and actually doing. More to the point, it’s hard to cross the line between trying to save a life and actually having someone live.
On the night of the March social for the Portugal Cove fire department, I was home and sound asleep when the pager went off, the radio chattering that the paramedics needed help on Bradbury’s Road. That’s all the dispatcher said. The whole house sound asleep, then the pulse of the pager followed by a handful of words.
That night it was icy roads, and no one on the radio. There wasn’t enough snow to stop my pickup truck, but it had been the kind of night you’d prefer to pull the curtains, turn off the outside lights and pretend the entire world was framed in by the outside walls of your house. It was the kind of night when it’s nice to have a fire banked down and glowing red in the wood stove, a blanket on the floor and the whole house barricaded, braced, against the winter wind outside.
There was snow drifting up against the back door as I went out. Each step was accompanied by a ripping crunch as my foot broke through the thin layer of ice on top of the softer snow. The kind of night where you’re driving right along the edge of the freezing line, so that sometimes there’s a wave of fine, almost dusty snow, and the next there’s rain, freezing into smears on a windshield that’s not warm enough yet for the wipers to sweep clear.
Once out and on the road, there was no sign that anyone else was responding, no trucks keying up their microphones to say that they’d even left the station. I could feel the swing of the back end of my pickup through the slush and snowdrifts, could feel the motion of it in my ears like I was on the edge of losing my balance, so I found myself always fighting against the rear wheels, cutting the front wheels too far over, trying to stay out of the ditch. The night was both empty and lonely, and after a half mile on the road and only thirty feet or so higher up the hill, the rain vanished completely. Snow was running sideways across the road in that proprietary way that suggests no one else has been there in hours. They were long, gilled, breathing snowdrifts, cut only by my own wheel marks in the rear-view mirror.
Turning off Bradbury’s Road and into the driveway, I saw the rescue truck abandoned, its lights spinning, doors yawning open in the blowing snow with no one in sight. They’d come up the same road that I had turned down, but they’d come up from the bottom, approaching the house from the other direction.
Everyone was there in the living room—husband, wife, two firefighters. The house would go on the market a couple of weeks later, a blue and white realtor’s sign swinging in the wind in the front yard, the curtains taken down so that you could look through the front windows as you drove by and see all the way through the house and out the back through the kitchen windows.
The husband was on the floor, and immediacy makes things simple: the room was muddy, and everything else seemed to be drawn from the same family of earth tones. He was sprawled flat on his back near the stairs, the couch pushed back out of the way. The brightest light on in the kitchen, casting a long yellow triangle across the carpet. The staircase behind, angled up. I can draw it all in my head with fat crayons, umber and brown and black, and the whole picture could be summed up with a minute’s work, a pattern of simple shapes in muted shades—but I’d probably be the only one who could make sense out of that drawing.
There was an airway down his throat, obscene, so that his mouth was a small and unyielding white plastic O, and the two firefighters were alone there, no one to drive, no one else to help. What kind of trust is that? They were out beyond the reach of the radios, both working, both trusting that someone else would eventually show up. You don’t know how physical CPR is unless you’ve done it; they were working him, sweating already. His skin was too, too white, fish-belly white, and it was shivering away from their hands in ripples. They pushed, and his stomach shimmied reflexively away in fleshy little waves.
They wanted the backboard and the gurney. One of the firefighters was ripping apart the trauma kit looking for the ambu-bag, the ribbed plastic cylinder that you squeeze to force air into the patient. They wanted someone to help them lift him onto the board, someone to help with the straps and to wrangle the gurney back out through the door, and no one in the world would ever want to be in that room. They needed help, in the kind of place most people would just want to walk away from.
When the big pumper came, it drove spinning right across the lawn, the heavy truck sliding sideways over the grass, tearing great trenches down through the snow to the soil. There was still green left in the grass—I remember seeing that—and even though it was March, the ground wasn’t frozen under the snow, so that the tracks left by the pumper were raw and wet and oozing, the ground successfully insulated from the harsh cold of the earlier part of the winter.
I wound up driving the man’s wife into the city after the rescue left. They knew better than to let her ride with them in the back, knew better than to let her watch the sheer brutality it takes to try to bring someone back to life after his heart has stopped. So she sat beside me in the front seat of the pickup while the red light whirred, spinning on its almost noiseless axis just inside the windshield, and we drove headlong into the battering snow, the wind darting at us sideways through every single gap in the trees.
I remember asking that Faustian question: Do you want me to put the siren on? Of course you want me to put the siren on. If you could press a button and make the truck sprout wings to get there even faster, you would. But no one will ever say yes. No one ever asks for the siren, embarrassed that its wail might be unnecessary, embarrassed because of the attention it will inevitably draw.
Embarrassed because someone has put that choice into their hands.
I took a different route to the hospital than the rescue did, yet at Thorburn Road we came together again. The rescue screamed by us at the T of an intersection, the driver stone-faced in my headlights and looking straight ahead. Even before we pulled into the intersection, the rescue and its lights had slipped away into the distance, and there was only the black night, the white snow and the looming spruce trees reaching in at the edges of the road, just like any other winter night.
Beside me, the man’s wife was grabbing the dashboard with both hands. Glancing over at her, looking out of the corner of my eye, I could see how stricken she was. I can gather up that expression in my head, but if I saw her again I doubt I’d recognize her. Just a small woman, grey hair, her hands most often in front of her mouth or bracing themselves against the dashboard as the truck slithered sideways around corners.
Coming into Emergency with her—a woman who had sat next to me in my truck, so close that I could hear her stifled sobs, but whose name I would never know—I watched the emergency room nurse spot me in my firefighting gear, put the pieces together and give her head that final, warning half shake.
The shake that means don’t tell her yet, but he’s dead.
It’s bad enough that you know you shouldn’t make promises, that you are so careful you don’t even begin to suggest the possibility that things might be all right. This was worse. The nurse’s gesture was saying don’t even think about being reassuring, don’t even say “The doctors are doing their best.” Wash your hands of this woman in the waiting room and walk away, as clean as you can, as clean as you can ever be when you’re lying by not telling what is obviously now the truth. That’s what the
look is supposed to do; it’s supposed to give you the cue to disengage, to get away while you can. It’s a throwaway, a professional kindness, a warning, and when you get it, your heart falls.
So you melt away, walking carefully and purposefully through the Staff Only door to the barren painted hallway where the ambulance patients are brought in. It’s a different part of the hospital, this: cream-coloured cinder-block walls with absolutely no decoration, completely utilitarian, non-slip mats on the floor and often, if it’s busy, cast-off equipment and packaging littering the base of the walls, thrown aside while the gurney’s still moving and the doctor’s already up on top of the patient.
It’s like the difference between the restaurant and the receiving area. Step through the door at the right time and you can see straight into the back of a waiting ambulance, its lights still on, so that it looks strangely as if it’s waiting there for you, open-mouthed. But your job, win or lose, is done, and the only ones who ever come to tell you anything about the outcome for your patients are the paramedics and the other ambulance guys. They’re the only ones who seem to know that it might actually matter to you.
Sometimes it’s days later before some sort of message trickles back. “They think she might have a tear in her liver,” one will say, shrugging. “She’s still on the fourth floor, serious condition.”
“You know that black car off the road near the water? Had a skull fracture after all.”
You wait in the empty hallway, no longer part of anything, and the only thing you can really think of doing is leaving, feeling like the other team is somewhere else, celebrating in their own dressing room. Except you know they’re not celebrating, because he’s dead. It’s as simple and final as that.
But someone has to wait to pick up the backboard, someone has to wash it off and collect the loose tangle of black nylon strapping that held the patient on the board, someone still has to slide it back into the empty, cooling rescue truck and imagine that there’s nothing important about it, that the board doesn’t always ride with its own ghosts.
No one ever effectively tells you what it will do to you. Sure, they tell you that you can’t help but be affected by what you will see. They describe, carefully and professionally and clinically, under the staring fluorescent lights in the training room—a room where nothing ever seems truly difficult—how it may come at you strangely, in your dreams, or even sometimes in daydreams, triggered by something as simple as driving by a particular house again.
Dreams may seem dry and easy to deal with. You know they might come, and you think you’ll be ready when they do. They’re like the offhand warning on a cigarette package—“Cigarettes may cause cancer”—that you don’t want to see anyway, and that your eyes eventually learn to gloss right over, however horrible the pictures. But the trainers don’t tell you how the nightmares will actually pick you up by the neck and shake you silly, how they will blast your nights with doubt and blame and leave you cringing in ways you can’t even understand, let alone deal with.
And they sure don’t tell you about the sex.
They really should tell you about the sex, at least so it doesn’t smack into you unexpectedly. They should have told me that I would come home with the death smell still in my nose, with the powder from the gloves still on my hands, with it all still clinging, impermeable, to my clothes. That I would think I should be monastic, that I should be saintly and thoughtful in what everyone considers a solemn moment. They should tell you that in reality all you will want to do is rip the clothes off someone you love. That you will want to roll wild, will want to boil, will want your flesh to shiver, will want to tremble and fall.
That you’d be making love to someone who didn’t understand why she should be awakened in the middle of the night by someone both physically and mentally cold, a partner single-minded, desperate, determined and a hundred miles away from anything that looks like the storybook definition of love.
That you’d want to howl at the night that they’re dead, they’re dead—but I’m still alive. The world is dark and you are inexplicably, violently angry.
Since the trainers didn’t warn me, afterwards I’d spend the rest of the night ashamed for just that, listening to the even breathing of the person sleeping next to me, sleeping with a damned clear conscience.
And that it would happen again, and again, and again—every time as frightening and necessary and unexplainable as the first. It just didn’t seem fair that after all that futile effort and crushing doubt, I actually got to have one more thing to hate myself for.
Sometimes I would go into the fire station in the dark on my way home from a call, late at night after the other firefighters had left, when the only lights in the place were the single set that always stayed on in the back, over the radio table. I’d let the door slam behind me, stand in the half-light and just soak in the place. Smells always take me shooting back, and a moment in the fire hall was all it ever took. The faint hint of diesel exhaust and the smell of rubber from the tires on the trucks, squatting motionless on their smooth concrete pad.
I’d turn on the big power switch on the side of the driver’s seat in each truck, check the air pressure, flick the emergency lights all on, shut them all off again. Sometimes I’d open the big front doors and roll the trucks out, letting them build up the air brake pressure to full before backing them into the bays again. I’d put the radio on scan and listen to the chatter. I’d climb up into the big square box of the rescue, checking to see that the trauma kit pockets were packed with new gloves, that all the straps on the breathing gear were extended and ready to put on, that the mask visors were clean and dry.
The training books have instructions for all of that: how to mix exactly the right solution for washing and rinsing the breathing apparatus masks, how to wipe down the straps and check every gauge to make sure the tanks are completely full. There are fixed dates for when the tanks have to be pressure-tested, and an address in California where you send pressurized samples of air from the cascade system that recharges the tanks so the system can be tested for contaminants. There are regular dates for recertifying on first aid and oxygen therapy, and instructions for checking the heat tags on aluminum ladders to see if they’ve been weakened by exposure to too much heat. If a small circle changes colour and won’t change back, the ladder goes out of service. There are even stale dates on the IV bags of saline in the burn kit, and you can check every single one, tag the old ones and take them out of service.
But there are no instructions anywhere on how firefighters can learn to simply and painlessly let go.
Smelling the faintly acidic, sharp odour of the medical gear and the adhesive tape, I’d turn the power on and then climb down to look at the pump panel and verify that all four tank-fill lights were lit on the pumper, so that I’d know the tank was brimming with a thousand gallons of water. But more than anything else I’d be listening, just to see if there was anything left to hear. I always thought there should be voices in all that waiting gear, if it was quiet enough. If you listened hard enough—if your ears were set to the right discrete frequency. I longed to hear if the tools still spoke about cutting cars, if the air masks mentioned all the searches done while crawling on your hands and knees. Most of all, listening to the varnished plywood of the backboard: pressed up against the back of every victim, the backboard should have known if there was anything left to say.
I listened and I waited, but all I heard was the trucks shifting and pinging now and then on their concrete pads, and sometimes the thin crackle of interference breaking in on the station’s base radio.
And I imagined what it was like for the woman I’d driven to the hospital, to be sitting alone and waiting there in the emergency room, abandoned by everyone, shed like another set of used rubber gloves by professionals already changing channels, turning their minds and hands to the next case, the next car, the next emergency.
Someone would have to come out and tell her, and I would have long ago vanished as
easily as a ghost, just a firefighter who had driven her to the hospital as she was suddenly overtaken by far more serious concerns.
One training night we took one of the firefighters who was being a know-it-all and tied him down in the Stokes basket, neck collar on tight, everything immobilized just as if he were an accident victim, and then we stood the basket on end and leaned him up against the side of the fire station.
Then we all went inside for coffee.
He played along for ten minutes or so, trying to be a good sport.
We eventually went out to get him when he started shouting, but not because we were in any rush to let him go. Fact was, we were afraid the neighbours on either side of the fire station might complain.
FOURTEEN
I can, if I try, if I dwell on it, find at least one mistake for almost every scene I’ve ever gone to.
There are just too many variables, too many ways to do things wrong. I’d be down in a roadside ditch, up to my knees in water, holding an unconscious accident victim’s head up out of the water so he wouldn’t drown, while at the same time I’d be shaking with the huge nagging fear that I might have moved him too abruptly. That, in pulling his face up through the three inches of dark water, I might also have moved his neck in a way that had left him permanently paralyzed. There were always things I could have done better, and things that in retrospect perhaps I shouldn’t have done at all.
Three years in, and I’d finally learned what my primary mistake had been. A basic one, that, different from the obvious ones I could think about as soon as I was back at the station. By the time I realized it, and how early on I’d made it, I was in far too deep to find a legitimate way out.
I didn’t have the benefit of a clear-cut, sharp starting point, a defined place where everything got out of control or even where it began to slide. I had the usual collection of small mistakes, but I’d never let someone die or turned the wrong way in a burning house or failed to find a victim in heavy smoke. I hadn’t ignored a serious head injury or sent someone home who was badly injured. Maybe with something like that, something as clearly significant as that, you know that you need professional help, and you get it.
Burning Down the House Page 12
