Paramedic

by Peter Canning

  Glenn washes the wound by pouring water on it. The girl starts crying and the mother says, “Don’t hurt my baby. Why aren’t you taking her to the hospital?”

  “I’ve got to wash the wound first,” Glenn says. “Remember what I said about calming down?”

  Glenn puts a five by nine over the cut then wraps it with tape.

  I go back to the ambulance to get the back set up while Glenn carefully picks the girl up and carries her over to the ambulance.

  “How come you’re not putting her on the stretcher out here?” the mother asks.

  Glenn passes the girl up to me, but the mother gets between us. The girl starts crying.

  “You’re hurting my baby,” the mother says.

  We finally get her on the stretcher, and Glenn gets in to tech the call while I drive.

  At the hospital, I go around to the back to help Glenn lift the stretcher out.

  “Can I help?” the mother asks.

  “We got it,” Glenn replies.

  We lift the stretcher out and wheel it in, the mother walking next to us, holding her girl’s hand and wiping her own tears away.

  The triage nurse comes over and removes the bandage to inspect the cut, then retapes it. “You can put her in the wheelchair,” she says.

  I wheel a chair over.

  “Aren’t there any doctors available to see her?” the mother says.

  “They’re all busy right now,” I say. “It’s just a cut. You’re going to have to sit in the waiting room for a little while. They’re very busy tonight.”

  Glenn comes over to help lift the girl up, but the mother pushes him aside and picks her up. Instead of putting her in the wheelchair, she starts toward the waiting room.

  “Ma’am,” Glenn says.

  She whirls around to face us. “Fuck you, goddamn honkys!” she says. “You won’t put her on the stretcher. I’m not putting her in no wheelchair. Where’s the doctor! I won’t let you treat my daughter like dirt. Fuck you! Fuck the both of you!” She walks into the waiting room and turns around again. “My daughter’s hurt. Fuck you, assholes! I’m going to report all of you!”

  Glenn and I are stunned. People are looking at us like we are criminals.

  “You can have my name and work number, lady. I don’t care,” Glenn says.

  The woman has already turned her back, and for a moment I think she will walk out of the hospital altogether with her daughter, but instead she takes a seat at the far end of the waiting room. “It’ll be okay,” she says to her daughter, then glares back at us.

  “What was that all about?” a security guard asks us.

  We shake our heads.

  Our relief is waiting for us back at the base, so as soon as we finish the paperwork we head in. Driving back, Glenn says, “I thought picking her up in my arms was nice, a personal touch.”

  “You’d think so.”

  “I mean, her leg wasn’t broken or anything. The only reason she was crying was because her mother was getting her all excited.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t care what she thinks. I’m going home. I’m going to take a shower, then I’m heading out to the bar, and I’m going to drink some cold beers. Screw her.”

  Waiting for Weicker So I Can Say No

  I’ve been in a bad funk lately. Normally it is only on Tuesday mornings when I ride into work for my first shift of the week that I feel the doubt and wonder why I am doing this, but this week the doubts last all week long. I just turned thirty-seven. I have no pension built up. I have no law degree or medical degree or business skill to fall back on. I am barely living on what I make, borrowing from savings to buy books. I will have to borrow again to get a new used car, as my trusty old Plymouth has a limited future. I think if I get married and have a kid by the time I am forty, I will be sixty when he is twenty, seventy-seven when he is my age. That’s old. I wonder how I will be able to send him to college or help him out with pocket change. My body is stiff and sore now. What will it be like then? Will I be able to throw a baseball around with my grandson, or will I have to be led on a walker to his Little League games on day-leave from the nursing home?

  We’re sent to an HMO for chest pain. We are directed to an exam room where a tall gaunt bearded man sits on an exam table, with a woman standing next to him holding his hand. I do a quick visual on him. He looks pale and unwell. “Are you having chest pain right now?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “I just have a headache.”

  “He’s been dizzy,” the woman says.

  A nurse sticks her head in the room and says, “The doctor wants to talk to you.”

  She leads me down the hall where I enter a small room and see the doctor sitting at his desk. He is a young man, probably not thirty. “Yes, hello,” he says, looking up at me. “He needs to go to Hartford Hospital. He’s orthostatic. Pressure of one twenty lying down, eighty sitting up. He’s very dehydrated. At the hospital, he’ll need a liter of normal saline and should have blood work done.”

  “I can run a line on the way in,” I say.

  “Great,” he says.

  He hands me an envelope with his orders in it, but he seals it first with tape. I take it and put it in my back pocket.

  We get the man on the stretcher and into the back of the ambulance. I have Glenn spike the bag of saline while I look for a line. No veins are visible. I have Glenn put a tourniquet on the other arm and he looks as well. I take my glove off so I can palpate with a more sensitive bare finger. I think I may feel one in the AC area, so I go in with a twenty, but get no flashback. I decide to screw it and we just head in. I am learning that unless they desperately need a line not to stick more than once if I can’t see or feel a vein.

  En route, I redo my physical assessment and question the man on his medical history and his current condition. He says he has Hodgkin’s disease and has been unwell for the last week. He is a little evasive in his answers, but I chalk it up to nervousness.

  We are only a few minutes from the hospital when I open the sealed envelope, looking for insurance information (which I don’t like to ask the patient for directly as I prefer to be a medical giver and not a bill collector). I glance through the papers, and a small notation at the bottom catches my eye. The patient has AIDS.

  This is important information for me to know and I am angry that both the doctor and the patient refused to share it with me. Very angry. I treat everyone alike. I have no hesitancy about sticking someone with AIDS. When I was in my internship at one hospital I had to elbow my preceptor out of the way so I could stick a person with TB and HIV. I wanted all the lines I could get. I have been asked by a nurse at one hospital why I bothered to put in a line and draw bloods from an HIV-positive male who had the crap kicked out of him by a man with a stick. I answered I treat all patients the same, and this man who had three bags of heroin just before his beating was in intense pain despite the heroin. He had been hit in the head and the ribs. While he was hemodynamically stable, I felt he might have significant injury. She wondered why I would risk my own health to do the IV in the ambulance which is a much less stable environment than the ER. I answered because it was my job.

  I normally wear gloves on all patients, but if I know they have AIDS I am extra careful. The doctor should have informed me. Imagine how a surgeon would feel if he learned the patient’s doctor had neglected to inform him the man he was to operate on had HIV. He’ll operate on anybody, but he needs to know that information. I am not a chauffeur. I am a medical professional. I deserve the respect and information I was denied.

  All week I go out and pick up patients, in nursing homes and in dirty tenements. I take them into the hospitals, where I transfer them to the hospital stretchers, and give my report to what sometimes seem like uninterested ears. We remake the stretcher and go back out for the next call. Drunks, colds and flu, back pain, small cuts. I do few calls that challenge my medical knowledge or skills. No Room 1 traumas, no bad chest pains with lethal rhyt
hms on the cardiac monitor, no cases of congestive heart failure with flash pulmonary edema requiring Lasix, nitroglycerin, and morphine from my drug box. And nothing to challenge me emotionally. And no funny kids to make me laugh. Not for weeks.

  I watch the doctors in their offices or at their workstations as they consult and hobnob with each other. There is a real class system here. The doctors are at the top, then the nurses, then us at the very bottom. I tell the nurses what I get for vital signs. They retake the vitals themselves and write them down on their pads. I tell them the story, they say thanks, then turn to the patient and ask what is the matter. They need to do it, but it makes me wonder what the point is sometimes. I might as well just pick them up, put them on the stretcher, and deliver them. I write my run forms, but they seem just like pieces of paper that will go unread.

  I am cramped sitting in 451. My back hurts. The sun is beating down on the ambulance, a tin can in the sun.

  There is a story in the paper about Weicker running for president as an independent. It says he may announce in October. I have believed all along that he would run because he is a political animal and can’t stand to be out of the spotlight. While he has no chance to win, he can have a great time traipsing about the country, speaking his mind, and ridiculing those who have a chance and must therefore bend constantly to the wind. I have talked with many of my Weicker friends about what we will say when he calls us. Most of us have worked for him for ten to twenty years, and in the past, when he summoned us, we always answered the call. I started working for him when I was seventeen. I worked for him in Washington during his 1976 campaign. I worked in Connecticut on his 1982 and 1988 campaigns with a year and a half in between in Washington.

  In 1988 I drank champagne with him as we flew back from a debate to Washington in a private Lear jet. He said then that if there was one person who would make the difference in his being reelected this time, it would be me. A month later I watched him walk across the darkened yard of his campaign manager’s house to board his campaign bus for the last time, as his victorious opponent announced over the radio, “The American Dream is alive and well in Connecticut.” When after his defeat he was living in exile in Virginia, I traveled down twice a month to write the newsletter for the new medical research public-interest group he was running. I was there when people wouldn’t return his calls, when he spent his time reading aloud to his faithful few excerpts from a Winston Churchill biography.

  When he called me at Eastern Ambulance in 1990 and told me to be at the state capitol to hear his announcement, I answered the call and busted my butt to get him elected governor. And when he was being hung in effigy for his stance on the state income tax, I traveled to Greenwich where he was holed up like a Mafia chieftain in a small apartment on his estate, protected by plainclothes cops, to work on a speech for him to give at Yale, a proclamation of the righteousness and inevitable logic of his course. I sat in the audience as he called on the people of his state to put children and the future first. He used my Walt Whitman quote: “I am the teacher of athletes. He that by me, spreads a greater breast than my own, proves the width of my own.” I stood with the crowd and cheered in a standing ovation. What a magnificent speaker he was, what life he gave to the words.

  “If he calls, I’m going to say no,” I tell my friend Tom Dudchik, Weicker’s former deputy chief of staff. “I’m going to point to the patch on my shoulder and say see what it says here: ‘Paramedic.’ That’s me. I have my own life now.”

  I am down on Weicker. While I think he would be just what the country needs as president because he is a decisive, unafraid man, he has no chance to win, and it would be another year out of my life with nothing gained. When you work for someone you believe in, you are a part of them, and their glory is yours, but then when it is over, you are left alone.

  After Weicker won the governorship he hired a former aide, now a big-time lawyer, to run his office, and I found myself faced with the choice of a diminished role in his office for less pay than I asked or the job at the health department with a bigger salary. I took the money and that shocked him, I think. For over ten months he never called me, and all the bigwigs in state government who didn’t know me, and all the lobbyists who were so nice to me when I was his campaign issues director, but who felt I was on “the outs” now, would walk by me as if I were nobody. Then I started writing speeches for him again, and all the people who wouldn’t return my phone calls or say hello to me when I walked by started treating me great. For two years I was back to being somebody. I wrote five major speeches, including two budget addresses, a state-of-the-state address announcing his plans to desegregate the state’s schools, and an address at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, after which he publicly said we were a great writing pair, like Gilbert and Sullivan.

  Then one afternoon, he gave me two days to write a graduation speech for him at the same time I was taking my paramedic exams. I wrote a dog-shit speech. He stopped calling me to write for him, and I was back to not having people return my phone calls again. He bumped me from his final budget address, saying he needed a numbers speech, not a passionate speech. “I can do numbers speeches,” I told him. “Just give me the numbers and I’ll write a better speech than anyone.” But he had already made up his mind. I told him I was quitting then, earlier than I had planned to. I was going to work for my buddy running for Congress and would start in February, instead of May or July. He told me I was being foolish, that my friend wouldn’t need me until September, and that besides, given the long-term incumbent who my friend was running against, he didn’t have a chance. I should stay and collect my paycheck, and he’d have some more speeches for me to write. I reminded him that when he was running for the Senate in 1970, his best friend and old college roommate Hank Harper came to work for him without asking what his chances were. Besides, nobody thought his opponent had a chance against him in 1988 and look what happened. Sting! Still he smiled and shook his head and genuinely wished me well. After the election, and before I started working as a paramedic, I saw him again, and we talked about our respective plans for the future. He told me he thought our paths would cross again. What he was saying without saying it was he was thinking about running for president.

  Weicker recently published his autobiography, which is more a political tract than a serious examination of his life and the choices he made. He had actually asked me to write it with him back in 1989, but his then publisher wanted a name writer with a better vocabulary than mine. He decided to put off the book himself, telling me he wasn’t certain his story was done yet. When it finally came out, written with a former newspaper editor, I was disturbed there was no mention of me. Not that there really should have been. What was he supposed to write? “Entry 1976: A new intern started working for me today. A fine young fellow, who when I ask to run and get me potato chips, gets them for me in record time. My suspicion is he keeps a cache in his desk rather than running down three flights of stairs to the Plastic City. What ingenuity! I see big things ahead for him.” “Entry 1987: Summoned Canning to my office. He came in as he always does, hopeful I will ask his opinion on policy. Tennis I declare. Noon. Be there. He played well and we won. Don’t know if the high point was Canning dropping Dan Quayle to his knees with a volley to the groin or my outstanding backhand.” Or “Entry 1992: I worked through the day with Canning on the state-of-the-state speech. Later, when the crowd finished its thunderous applause, I thought about asking him to stand and bow, as I’d say, ‘Let’s give a hand to the little people who write the songs that make us all sing.’ But I didn’t.”

  When he left office, a reporter for the New York Times recounted that Weicker had told him he wrote every word of his speeches himself.

  It is another smoldering hot humid day. At four in the afternoon, we’re called for an overdose off Huntington Street. “You’re going to need the stretcher,” the guy who flagged us down out front says. “He’s laid out on the floor.”

  “What’d he OD o
n?” I ask as Glenn gets the stair chair out.

  “I don’t know, man. He’s just some guy who’s staying with me. I can’t believe he did this, man, I’m late for work.”

  In the third-floor apartment we find a man lying on his back, soaked in water, barely breathing.

  “I threw water on him as soon as I found him. That was good, right?” the guy says.

  It is commonplace for people to throw water on people who OD.

  “No,” I say, “all that’s going to do is give him a cold. Does he do heroin?” I check the guy’s pupils, which are constricted.

  “Hey, man, I don’t know. He’s like, just staying with me.”

  “Does he do heroin?”

  “Well, yeah … yeah, he does.”

  Glenn notes fresh track marks on his arm.

  “Yeah, yeah, he injects it,” the guy finally says.

  “He looks real diaphoretic,” the cop who has shown up says.

  “That’s ’cause his buddy here threw water on him,” I say.

  “Hey, I didn’t know, man. That’s what everybody does. I was just doing my best, man,” the guy says.

  “Don’t do it next time.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  I get a line in his left forearm while Glenn spikes a bag of saline. After the line is set, I draw up one point two milligrams of Narcan and inject it slowly. Heroin depresses the central nervous system, which includes breathing. Narcan reverses the effects of heroin and other opiates. If pushed too fast, it can make a comatose patient suddenly alert, violent, and violently ill. As I push slowly, I note the man’s breathing is improving. His pupils are no longer constricted. I give him point eight more. He opens his eyes.

  “Did you shoot up?” I ask.

  He says he did two bags. He looks like he’s going to puke, so we give him a garbage bag when he sits up, but he just dry heaves then lies back down on the floor and closes his eyes.