Paramedic

by Peter Canning

  Eventually, I think the birth of this child was one of the best things that happened to Weicker. His disabled son gave him direction, and when the Republicans took control of the Senate in 1980, Weicker had the power to follow that direction. With Reagan proposing massive cuts in human-service programs, Weicker now had the clout of a high-ranking committee member to stand up and fight them, which he did, succeeding repeatedly in blocking Reagan’s proposed cuts and restoring millions of dollars in funding for education, the disadvantaged, and the disabled.

  The birth of his child let Weicker in on something I believe he had not truly felt before. His son represented the defenseless in the world and Weicker was the strong. Weicker, in my opinion, became a great senator, not just because of his seniority and leverage, but because he had something concrete to fight for that gave him the strength to stick those fights out. He was one of the few who time after time pushed the interests of kids. When everyone else in Washington was pushing for catastrophic health-care coverage for senior citizens, he was pushing it for kids. Even as governor, when making deep cuts in the state budget and angering nearly every special-interest group, he was pushing for expanded programs for kids, community-health centers, after-school programs, lead-paint removal projects.

  In his 1993 state-of-the-state speech, which I drafted for him, he shocked the legislature when he unveiled a plan to desegregate Connecticut’s schools, declaring, “the racial and economic isolation in Connecticut’s school system is indisputable. Whether this segregation came about through the chance of historical boundaries or economic forces beyond the control of the state or whether it came about through private decisions or in spite of the best educational efforts of the state, what matters is that it is here and must be dealt with.… When we walk the streets of our cities and look into the eyes of our children and see hopelessness, it is our loss and our failure. From innocence, bitterness is born, and at great cost.”

  He never avoided the tough issues. Kids growing up in the city get a bad break. Most of them are, in fact, doomed. Hartford is one of the poorest cities in the nation because its city boundaries are so tightly drawn. If it were like Los Angeles, Newington, West Hartford, Simsbury, and all the wealthy suburbs would be a part of Hartford, and their wealth would be shared. Instead there are two Connecticuts—one of promise, the other of despair. I was proud to help write the words, proud to have an orator of his tremendous ability give them life, and prouder still to work for a man who became a champion because he believed he was one, where other men wouldn’t have even bothered with the fight.

  Weicker used to say his job was to speak for the powerless, to bring their voices to the rooms of power they could not reach by themselves.

  Once, in 1982, we were on the way to a black church in Hartford. It was just Weicker and me in the car. I was driving, and we weren’t certain of the way. When we saw a school crossing guard, he told me to pull over so he could ask directions. “Excuse me,” he said, and asked her how to get to the church.

  She pointed and started to give directions, then she looked back at him and said, “I know you from somewhere. I’ve seen you on TV.”

  He said, almost embarrassed, “Lowell Weicker.”

  “Oh, bless you,” she said. “Bless you for the things you’ve done.”

  That moment made everything worthwhile. Often I hated him. He was at times a rich arrogant man, who one minute could treat you like a son and the next like a loathsome servant. But God, there were times when he could make the tingles run through you. He at least had a sense of the heroic, a sense of how it ought to be. That is no small thing.

  It seems to me that too many politicians know of the plight of children only through photo ops at soup kitchens and daycare centers. I can’t help but think that if they saw what we see in the city every day, their policies would be different. It would be children first, above all else. Weicker used to say the real problem was kids don’t vote.

  We’re called for a seizure in Stowe Village. The mother meets us outside and leads us up three floors to an apartment. She starts to open the door, but we hear barking and she slams it. “Put that dog away!” she shouts. “Get that damn dog away!”

  She opens the door a little bit, then opens it all the way.

  “Is the dog away?” I say.

  “He locked up. He all excited: the cops were just here ransacking my place. Got my boy all excited. I told them leave us alone. I got a sick boy. They didn’t find no guns here.”

  The house is a mess, but I doubt it is because it has been ransacked. In the living room there is a giant king-sized mattress. There are six kids in the apartment. Lying on the bed is a nine-year-old boy, who looks like he is sleeping. He is breathing. His skin temperature is normal.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “He just started bugging,” the mother says. “I seen that and I want to run away.”

  “He was having a seizure?”

  “I don’t know. He got a history of it.”

  I look to the oldest kid—a girl of about twelve. “Was he shaking?” I ask.

  She nods and says his whole body was moving.

  I check his pupils, but he tries to roll his eyes into the back of his head, and he starts crying.

  A little boy of about eight wearing only shorts starts yelling at me. “Take him to the hospital. Take him right now.” He looks like he wants to fight me.

  “Whoa, little man,” I say. “We’re going to take care of him.”

  “He just in the hospital this morning for dehydration,” the mother says. “I told the police I had a sick boy, but they went ahead and messed up my house.”

  I pick the boy up in my arms and carry him down the stairs. He is crying and says his head hurts. Cockroaches scatter on the floor in front of my feet.

  In the hospital, we put him in bed 9. The first thing the mother says to the nurse is “They got anything to eat around here?”

  My childhood wasn’t like that.

  Albany and Main after Dark in the Rain

  It’s night. A brisk wind sweeps the driving rain up Albany Avenue. We’re parked in front of Bridgestone Tires. The cops have something going on in the area and want an ambulance close by.

  Glenn has country music playing on the radio.

  There is a large puddle by the curb formed by a depression in the road. Four kids in hooded dark raincoats squat on the curb like gargoyles. A car drives by, hits the puddle, and casts up a tsunami that crashes down on the four children, who get up laughing, slap high fives, then hunch back down to wait for the next car.

  Fixed and Dilated

  It is a clear spring day, a little after three in the afternoon. We’re parked in front of the Farmington Avenue office having a late lunch of subs, chips, and cold sodas.

  “Four-five-one. Respond to 950 Asylum for the pediatric struck. On a one. Our switchboard’s lighting up in here with calls on this.”

  Glenn hits on the lights and I strap myself in. Asylum is parallel to Farmington.

  As we approach, we see a large nervous crowd in the street and on the sides of the road. School has just gotten out.

  “This could be bad,” Glenn says.

  “Let’s be quick,” I say.

  We get out and break through the crowd. Lying in the middle of the road on his side, is a small boy with a pool of blood under his head. A bystander is holding traction on the boy’s head to keep his spine in line. He has blood coming from his nose and mouth. He is breathing, but he appears lifeless. He has no response to pain.

  “He flew twenty feet through the air,” someone says.

  Glenn checks his pupils. “Fixed and dilated,” he says quickly.

  I put on a cervical collar and roll him onto a spinal board. Shawn Kinkade, another paramedic, appears at my shoulder and asks if I need a hand or if he can set up my intubation kit. Behind me I can feel the crowd surging. Someone is struggling to get through. They are hysterical. They touch my shoulder but are pulled away. There is screami
ng and crying all around us. I tell Shawn I am just going to boogie with the kid. We are in sight of the hospital. We put the board onto the stretcher, wheel it quickly to the ambulance, and lift it in. I get in back with our paramedic student, and Glenn pulls away. In the back we immobilize the head with towel rolls, strap the boy to the board, and put on high-flow oxygen. We’re at Saint Francis thirty seconds later.

  We come through the doors. “Pediatric, hit by car, thrown twenty feet. Pupils fixed and dilated,” I say as we wheel him past the triage desk straight to the trauma room.

  The room is empty. We lift the board and lay him on the trauma stretcher. Other than his respirations there is no life in his little body. His arms lie at his sides like a baby Jesus. It is a terrible few moments while we wait for the trauma team.

  They arrive quickly and converge on the boy, while we step back. His blood pressure is 160—sky-high for a kid—a sign of massive intracranial pressure. They get an IV line. He has no other injuries but the head. They give medications, take X rays. Dr. Morgan arrives. “Hyperventilate him,” he says. They intubate. The more oxygen they get in, the more they can stop the swelling. They put him on a respirator.

  I tell the story over and over. “Thrown twenty feet. Fixed and dilated at the scene. Right out here on Asylum.”

  In the hall I learn that Shawn and Art in 453, who arrived on scene shortly after we did, took in the kid’s mother and brother, who were also hit. The mother hurt her leg, the brother was hardly scratched. She was walking them across the street holding their hands.

  We get the word that the CAT scan shows a massive bleed in the brain.

  “He probably tore a meningeal artery the moment he hit the ground,” Shawn says.

  “He was fixed and dilated on the scene,” Glenn says.

  The Life-Star helicopter crew accompanies the stretcher as it’s wheeled back from CAT scan. He will be transferred to Hartford Hospital, which has a pediatric intensive-care unit. The mother is wheeled out into the corridor. They stop the boy’s stretcher next to hers so she can see him. We watch from down the hall. She struggles to rise from the board that she is strapped to. A primal wail rises from her. He lies there, his eyes swollen shut, a tube in his mouth, a machine breathing for him. “I’m sorry!” she cries. “It’s my fault! It’s my fault!” She calls his name over and over.

  At Hartford a brain scan confirms what we suspected at the scene when we first lifted his eyelids and saw his spirit gone. The boy is brain-dead.

  We return to the scene. It is an hour later. The police have three blocks taped off with their yellow tape. We tell an officer we took the boy in and they let us pass. We get out of the ambulance and take our radios. We stop at the next set of yellow tape. Television cameras are there filming the scene. A purple van with a smashed bumper is still in the road. We try to piece together what happened. The school is on the left. The boy’s apartment building is across the street on the right. At that hour, Asylum is a busy dangerous road with cars racing home to the suburbs. Yet the mother led her boys across the street in the middle of the block. I can still see the small pool of blood in the pavement. Glenn guesses from the position of the car, the driver must have swerved to the right, clipping them with the left front bumper.

  An unmarked police car is allowed to pass through the yellow tape. A policewoman gets out of the police car and walks toward the purple van. She opens the front door and helps a woman out. The driver has been in the van all this time. She is in her late thirties, early forties. Her face is sheer pain. It looks like broken glass. She walks unsteadily, as if each step takes her into a new world that is nothing but grief, and gasps for painful air.

  Politicians and Parents

  The lead story on the eleven o’clock news is the release of the Baby Emily report, concerning the case of a nine-month-old who was sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend, resulting in her death. The anchors announce a feature on why, unlike traffic accidents, many deaths caused by abuse are never investigated. The promo clip shows a brief shot of the purple van at this afternoon’s accident scene, blocked off by police tape.

  The released report on the baby’s death has blame for everyone, particularly the overworked caseworkers and the hospitals who allegedly missed earlier signs of abuse. They show clips of the family members blaming the state and clips of politicians vowing to hold people responsible so this never happens again. There is a lot of blaming going on. All the newscasters look appropriately concerned and disquieted by the issue of child abuse that they are now hyping as their only-on-our-channel-do-you-get-the-inside-story series. Despite the earlier clip, they don’t mention this afternoon’s accident. I hear later it was highlighted on the six o’clock news, but by eleven it is old copy.

  Later in the broadcast they show a rally of welfare mothers protesting proposed cuts in welfare payments. “It’s not our babies’ faults they were born into poverty,” a mother complains.

  I turn the TV off, upset with all I have seen. The politicians say we have to get these kids out of harm’s way, no matter what the cost, as if it is only five or maybe six kids who are left unprotected due to an overworked or mismanaged system.

  What I know is that day in and day out I go into houses unfit for human habitation. On nearly every street, in nearly every building, children are living at risk from drugs, violence, neglect, poverty. I’ve been in filthy apartments with cribs in every room, even one apartment where they had to move a crib so we could open the door, and move it again so we could leave. All over the city kids are being brought into a world they’ll share with cockroaches, rats, syringes, and stray bullets. To make them all safe, you cannot talk about taking one kid out of a house here and there. To make them all safe you’d have to bring in a caravan of buses and take them out building by building. Tens of thousands. You’re talking a mass evacuation. You’d need the National Guard or the Pied Piper of Hamelin. That’s the rock truth.

  Within two months, the mother of the baby who was sexually assaulted will be arrested for dealing heroin.

  The Ceiling

  It’s three in the morning. I’m wide awake looking at the ceiling, my mind full of doubts. Maybe I should have spent more time on the scene and intubated the kid right there; more deeply oxygenating him might have helped slow the rapid swelling in his brain. Maybe when Shawn asked me if I needed any help, I should have said, call Saint Francis and let them know we’re coming. It would have given them another minute’s notice so they could have been ready for us when we burst through the doors. Maybe I should have taken the boy crosstown to Hartford Hospital, where they have pediatric specialists who might have known some new experimental technique that could have grabbed his departing life back by its small ankle and pulled it back into his body. I don’t know. Failure haunts me.

  I see the face of another kid hit by a car, six years earlier. When we arrived he was lying just below a rise in the middle of the road. He had an altered respiratory pattern. He was crying and then going out, crying and then going out. We were quick on the scene then, too, but I’d had to ride all the way in with him to Bay State Hospital, and all the way I was saying, “Come on, little buddy,” as I hovered over him. The right side of his head was swollen. His left femur was broken. I’d tried to put in an airway, but his teeth were clenched. I put him on highflow oxygen, but I should have hyperventilated him with a bag mask then. I’d been working only a few months and didn’t know any better. When we got to the trauma room, I felt they were looking at me like I was the one who had run over him. He started seizing and then they intubated him. My partner said she didn’t think he was going to make it.

  I went to a basketball game that night and was silent through the whole game. I don’t remember a moment of it. When I got home and turned on the news, I expected to see my face on a “Wanted for Murder” poster. I used to drive back to that scene, hoping to see a kid with a cast on his leg and crutches laughing and playing Simon Says with the other kids on the street. He lived, but he h
ad a closed head injury. I still don’t know if he has a regular life. He should be sixteen now. Maybe he slurs his speech and drools and doesn’t have a clue about what happened to him. Maybe he’s fine and healthy and handsome and has his own girlfriend, who he makes out with on the familyroom couch when his parents aren’t at home. I don’t know.

  I keep staring at the ceiling.

  I want to be better at what I do.

  Bad Start

  I’m in at six-thirty the next morning, a half hour early as if to say I’m not afraid of coming to work. I’ve just met a paramedic student, a rider, when I hear over the radio, “Four-six-two, Peter?” I’m parked outside the garage, checking supplies. I answer on the radio.

  “Can you respond to a cardiac arrest?”

  Glenn isn’t in yet, so I grab an EMT I don’t know and the rider I have just met, and we tear out lights and sirens headed into Hartford to meet a basic crew at the scene.

  The call goes badly. The woman is in v-fib, and I shock her into asystole. The rider tries for a tube and puts it in the esophagus. I try to get the pacer working, but it won’t capture. The rider still can’t get the tube, so we switch places. I can’t see anything but vomit and blood in the airway. The basic crew’s suction unit isn’t working. The rider gets an IV in and we start a round of drugs. I still can’t get the tube. I realize we’ve been in the house too long, so we pack up and carry the woman out of the house on the board. Her arms dangle and bang against the porch door. The woman is heavy and my back feels like it is going to explode. In the ambulance, I try again for the tube, but I can’t see the cords. Another dose of epi puts the woman in v-fib. I let the rider shock her. She returns to asystole. I try for the tube again but see nothing. I get a whiff of her dead breath and fight to keep from puking.