Mortal Men

by Peter Canning

  “Wait,” Audrey Davis said, “Fuentes on Vine Street, I did that call. First they send another car to Zion Street. No one there. They call back. They misheard. It’s Vine Street. So because we’re north, they send us. The lady had rigor mortis. We called her right there. She was stiff. She’d been dead for hours.”

  “No, I think Capitol Ambulance killed her,” Melnick said.

  “Yeah, if we did, you must have been on duty,” Nestor said.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll never reach your kill total. Listen to this.” He read, “National EMS expert Gerald Devine said the standard for an ambulance response is five to eight minutes, a standard that a study done by this paper shows is violated continually in the city of Hartford, where ambulance response times often exceed ten minutes.”

  “He’s probably never even been in an ambulance,” Audrey said. “Response time is BS anyway. You get to the call in three minutes. It takes another ten to get someone to let you in the outside door because the security system’s busted, then climb the stairs because the elevator’s broken, walk down the hallways and get someone to come to their own apartment door because their music is playing so loud. Then the person who answers the door doesn’t even know that one of the twenty people living in the apartment called for an ambulance. ‘Oh, it’s Tyrecia. She got a stomachache.’”

  “Councilman Perry Santiago asked for a full-scale investigation into ambulance response times in Hartford and a review of the city’s current agreement with Capitol Ambulance. ‘Our citizens’ safety is in jeopardy,’ he proclaimed.”

  “Santiago? Do they say in there that he’s in bed with Champion, not to mention someone else we all know by the name of Helen Atreus? Of course not. And for another thing, if the citizens didn’t use us as a taxi service, we’d be able to get to the real calls on time.”

  “Maybe they’ll put some more cars on.”

  “Who are they going to put in the more cars?’ Victor said.

  “Pay us more money, more people will want to do the job.”

  “It’s all bull,” Victor said.

  “Yeah,” Audrey said. “Who’s going to do it, if we don’t? Champion? Give me a break. All they know how to do is transfers.”

  “The fire department is behind it. They get the nine-one-one contract, it’s more jobs for them. It’s a national trend.”

  “They don’t want to do medical calls. They don’t like vomit and phlegm and shit. We can’t even get them to come out to back us up on codes anymore. All they want is to fight fires. Their union will never go for it.”

  “No, some of the young guys there are talking about it. They’re convincing the old guard. Fewer fires means fewer calls which means less money for the fire service.”

  “It won’t happen,” Nestor said. “This is just a story to sell papers. It’s their SOP. Find an enemy, slam them all over the front page, and move on to another target. Next week they’ll be slamming the governor or the mayor or the cops or the teachers’ union. The fact is no one really wants to do our jobs and no one wants to pay the money so we can do it right. We’re just easy to walk-on. You all think you’re heroes. But you’re just meat in the seat, you’re just keeping it warm for the next sap to take your place. Nothing more.”

  Chapter 13

  Dispatch called. “Four eighty-two, signal one thirty. Mr. Jones is to see Ben in his office.”

  “That’s not good,” Troy said.

  We didn’t see Ben too often, and generally tried to stay out of his way. Occasionally he drove around the city in his bronco—and if a critical call came in you could be sure he’d try to show up on your scene, but most of the time he was in his office reviewing run forms or out teaching classes. If any of us screwed up on the job as far as the medical care we provided, he was the one who called us in. His summons was never a good thing.

  “What kind of trouble did you get yourself into now?” Troy asked.

  “Maybe he wants to ask me about you.”

  That jarred him. “Like what?”

  “Relax,” I said. “I bet it is about Victor. He got into it with a doctor the other day, and maybe he wants to hear my take on it.”

  “Do you think?”

  “Yeah, it’s got to be that.”

  That seemed to satisfy Troy.

  Nestor sat at his table in the crew room, his head slumped forward, snoring. He was unshaven, and he reeked of body odor. I also thought I smelled alcohol on him. For all anyone knew he could have been a homeless man who’d wandered in off the street. Someone has set a can of deodorant on the desk next to him.

  Ben was waiting for me in his office. He didn’t smile. “Have a seat,” he said.

  I sat uncomfortably.

  “Two things,” he said. “First, you were present during Mr. Sanchez’s altercation with a physician at the hospital.”

  “I was.”

  “How out of line was he?”

  “Victor thought his patient was having an MI, and the doctor was pooh-poohing it. They both got in each other’s face. Then the patient coded.”

  “I understand that part of it. I just need to know how bad the altercation was prior to Mr. Sanchez being vindicated at least for his medical judgment.

  “Neither of them handled it very well. Victor said a couple nasty things about the doctor after the call, but by the end of the shift, he’d let it go.”

  “Well, the doctor made a complaint.”

  “If it had been my brother who was the patient, I would have been glad to know a paramedic like Victor was fighting that hard for him.”

  Ben nodded. “Fair enough.”

  There was an ominous pause, and then he said, “Number two is a little more serious, concerning you.”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling the sudden chill.

  “You’re not an IV tech, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Have you been giving Mr. Johnson D-fifty on the job?”

  “No.” I didn’t like lying, but if I had to pick sides, Troy was my partner.

  He stared at me hard, then said, “Don’t let me catch you doing it. If you are a paramedic, that’s one thing. You are not even IV certified. Anyone catches you, that’s practicing medicine without a license. You don’t just lose your job, but the state comes after you. They come after you and that’s bad for us. The last thing we need is more headlines. EMTs practicing beyond their scope. We’ll lose our license.”

  “I understand.”

  “This is a liability issue. Consider this fair warning.”

  “I understand.”

  “We’re clear then?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did he want?” Troy asked when I got back out to the ambulance.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “He asked about me?”

  “He wanted to know why I wanted a new partner.”

  “What?”

  “I told him you were too ugly. I wanted someone prettier. He told me I was out of luck. ‘“Live with it,’ I believe he said.”

  “Lee, you’re all right,” he said. “For a new guy.”

  Chapter 14

  There aren’t many things in the world that truly matter. In the world of EMS one thing that does is the bond you have with your partner. In a world ruled by chaos, you have to have something to rely on—that’s your partner. You don’t have that, you are truly alone.

  In time Troy and I got along well. Troy liked working with me because I was older, I didn’t tell tales out of school, and though he wouldn’t admit it, I did a decent job of keeping him out of trouble. But most of all I think he liked working with me because I recognized just how good he was at his job.

  He ran the calls, and I had his back. Some lesser medics said he was just lucky to get the saves he did. But he had a gift. One evening, when we were covering a suburban town, we drove by the baseball field to watch some of the American Legion regional baseball championship. We parked just beyond the centerfield fence, got out and stood leaning against the front of t
he ambulance. It was a beautiful evening. Parents, friends, and people like us just interested in seeing a good game filled the bleachers and lined the sides of the field. I estimated a crowd of several thousand. The air smelled of popcorn, hot dogs, and bubble gum.

  “He’s got to be throwing ninety,” Troy said, referring to the six-foot-three-inch Central team pitcher. “I read about him in the Courant. He may get drafted in the first round. All he throws is fastballs and off-speed pitches. His dad won’t let him throw any curves till he turns eighteen. Even knowing what’s coming, they still can’t hit him. Pat’s dad was the same with him, except Pat couldn’t throw ninety. He did all right, but sometimes he’d get tattooed. Then he got to Amherst, developed his curve and was a small college All-American his sophomore year. Junior year, he threw his arm out.”

  “So like you he had a chance to go pro?” Victor had mentioned something to me about Troy’s prowess as a centerfielder for his high school baseball team, not to mention football, basketball and track.

  “Why would I want to go pro, when I have all the women, glory and fame I got here, huh?” He laughed and punched me in the shoulder. “Don’t believe everything they say about me. Only half of it is true.”

  “You were a star?”

  “I still am.” He winked.

  “Excuse me for forgetting.”

  “I’ll let it go this time.” He turned back to the game to watch the pitcher drill the batter in the chest with a fastball. The batter dropped at home plate motionless.

  The crowd went silent. The players and umpire stood looking at the young man. The catcher motioned frantically to a coach.

  “Meet me at home plate,” Troy said. With one graceful motion, he scaled the five-foot fence and sprinted across the field.

  I got in the ambulance, and hit the lights on. It looked like the umpire had started compressions on the boy’s chest.

  I drove around the foul pole, and down the first baseline. I could see Troy kneeling over the boy. I saw him raise his fist and strike him in the chest. Then my view was obscured.

  By the time I had the stretcher out and with the help of a player was wheeling it to the plate, the boy was sitting up, and the crowd applauding. His parents had come out of the stands.

  “I can play. I’m all right,” the boy said. “I’m all right.”

  The boy’s mother cried. The trembling father kept shaking Troy’s hand. “He’ll be fine,” Troy said. “But he has to go to the hospital.”

  The boy looked at his coach. “I can play.”

  “Son, you weren’t breathing,” the coach said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well, you are and you aren’t,” Troy said. “Here’s what happened. Your heart beats like this.” He made a squeezing motion with his fist. “The ball hit your chest when your heart was in what we call a vulnerable state, so instead of refilling, it got knocked out of sync and started beating spastically like a handful of worms. It was in what we call ventricular fibrillation. The heart can’t pump blood. No blood gets to your brain, you pass out. When I punched you in the chest—you may not remember and if it’s sore I apologize—I did it to send an electrical change into the heart, which seemed to have worked. It reset it, and now it’s back beating right. So you’re fine, but you need to get checked out, and probably be observed overnight just to make certain everything is back to normal. No one can promise that it is. We need to be on the safe side, besides, all the chicks will bring you flowers, you’ve got to take advantage of that. Trust me.”

  “It’s best, Adam,” the mother said. “You know we want you to play, but you scared us.”

  “My chest is sore,” the boy said.

  “Attaboy,” Troy said. “Now hop up on the stretcher. We’ll give you a hand.”

  The crowd stood and applauded as we placed him on the stretcher. Troy took off his Yankees hat and acknowledged their ovation like he was Mickey Mantle himself.

  Troy said later, “My mother told me once everyone has two choices in life—to be on the stage or to be in the audience. I like the stage.”

  “I can see you do.”

  We were often on the news, but in critical cases still we had a point of pride to try to get off the scene before the cameras arrived. But even more important than beating the TV cameras was beating Ben’s arrival at the scene.

  “Four eighty-two, shooting at Edgewood and Homestead. On a one, wait for police.”

  “Four eighty-two acknowledges, Edgewood and Homestead, going to wait for the cops.”

  We were just three blocks away at Albany and Magnolia.

  “Four-oh-four, I’m at Sigourney and Farmington, headed there.” Ben came over the radio.”

  “Scoop and skee-daddle,” Troy said. “Burger King is on me if we get out of there before Ben.”

  “They want us to wait for the cops.”

  “Let’s see what we find.”

  We came screaming down Edgewood. A crowd was in the street. There were no police cars. “There he is,” Troy said.

  A man lay face down on the sidewalk. Troy was opening his door before I had even come to a stop. With him running to the patient, I had no choice but to pull the stretcher and join him in the crowd. Troy had rolled the man on his back. He pulled an ET tube out of his right leg pocket, just above his knee, ripped open the wrapping, and then shoved his hand into the man’s mouth. The proper way to intubate someone—to put a breathing tube down their windpipe—was to kneel by their head and use a steel-bladed laryngoscope to move their tongue to the side, and look down their throat for the vocal cords, which should be illuminated by the tiny light bulb at the end of the blade. Several times at shooting scenes, Troy stuck his hand down the patient’s throat and used his fingers to feel for the epiglottis, the little piece of tissue that guards the opening to the cords. Once he found it, he could blindly manipulate the tube into the trachea. It wasn’t easy, but if you knew how to do it it was a time-saver.

  “I’m in,” Troy said. “Let’s get him out of here.”

  We got him on the board and managed to get him in the back of the ambulance without being knocked over by the crowd fighting to help us. Troy did CPR while I drove. As I turned right on Homestead, I saw Ben’s fly car come wailing up the street following two police cars. The police cars pulled on to Edgewood. Ben followed us.

  “Eighty-two, pull over, I’ll hop in.”

  “I don’t know if you want to leave your car here,” I said.

  “Cross the Woodland Bridge and stop there.”

  “Don’t stop!” Troy shouted. “Get him to the hospital.”

  “Troy’s already got him intubated,” I said. “Help us unload at the hospital. I’m patching it in now.”

  He followed right on our tail. When I parked a minute later at Saint Fran, he was out of his fly car and reaching to open up the back. “We had to go quick,” I said. “We were on the scene before we could hold up.”

  Ben nodded, and then looked to Troy, who was still doing compressions. “What do you have?”

  “Shot to the chest. By the way, nice to see you.”

  “I’ll do the compressions,” Ben said. “Pull the stretcher.”

  He stood on the stretcher rails and did compressions all the way to the trauma room, then left without saying a word.

  The ED doctors cracked the man’s chest, and did open cardiac massage, while they tried to tie off the hole in his heart, but he’d already pretty much bled out. They pronounced him dead before Troy had even turned in his paperwork.

  “Did you see the look on Ben’s face—foiled again,” Troy said gleefully. “That was a classic.”

  “I didn’t notice,” I said.

  “I’m always out of there before him. Always. Too quick.”

  I tried not to encourage his behavior.

  Billy Dalton was a veteran medic, who after ten years in the street had started medical school a year ago. He was back for the summer to make some money before heading off to school again. He asked me about th
e shooting, and I told him how Troy had digitally intubated the man.

  “Did he tell you who taught him how to do it?”

  “No.” It was hard for me to imagine anyone teaching Troy anything.

  “I precepted him when he started here. He’s crazy, but he has a gift. Did he tell you about the time we delivered triplets? They were all preemies, barely the size of my hand. I delivered them, handed them to Troy. They were so small they just slipped out. I didn’t think any of them would make it. They were twenty-four weeks. I handed them to him blue and he raised them to his mouth and blew pink air into them. All three lived. The most amazing thing was it was the only time I would see his hands shake. He’s smart too. You know that, you’ve worked with him. I tried to get him to go to school at night, but he’d have no part of it. I told him he’d be an awesome trauma surgeon. He said he’s not the book type. ‘You and Pat can be the doctors. I’ll caddy for you at the club on Sundays,’ he said.”

  I brought it up with Troy later. “You’d be in your glory running a trauma team,” I said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You just have to put the work in. If you haven’t figured out by now that you can do anything, I don’t think you ever will.”

  He just grunted. “Books aren’t for me,” he said, and hid his face in the sports page.

  Many people think in terms of career advancement, making money, climbing the ladder, but for those like Troy, there was nothing above being a paramedic. The adrenaline, the freedom, the sights of the city, the stories, the view of life and the unique understanding of its fragile balances—you didn’t get that in an office job. He was a soldier, not a general, and the streets of the city were his turf, his home.