“I know, I just want to be prepared,” he says. “I’ll keep it with me.”
Pam and I roll our eyes. Downstairs, he takes the morning paper from the breakfast table and stuffs it into the suitcase.
We finally get on our way, no lights, no sirens.
“This ever happen to you before?”
“I’ve just not been feeling great lately.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I own my own business.”
“That’s good.”
I don’t ask him much else. As I write my run form, I think this is a good story to tell. We get called for a chest pain, have to break into the guy’s house and climb over the fertilizer, and he ends up spending twenty minutes packing his suitcase. You meet all kinds.
I’ve been doing a lot of interesting calls lately. To me a call is interesting if it is medically challenging or if I see something in the people or the situation that makes me think about life and the human race in general. I got sent to Hartford Hospital to take a young woman to the McLean home in Simsbury, where my mother spent the last years of her life before succumbing to multiple sclerosis. This thirty-year-old woman’s problem is a sudden malevolent cancer that has overwhelmed her body in just a few months’ time. A troubling headache led to shoulder pain, to stomachaches, to a doctor telling her her condition was terminal. She is constantly nauseated, can barely even tolerate sipping water, feels pain despite the morphine pumped continually into her body. She is going to McLean to die. I tell her it’s a very nice place, and she seems interested in this. I don’t tell her my mother died there, just that it is one of the nicest facilities in the state. I am impressed that this seems to please her. I think if I were her, I wouldn’t care about anything. How do you face dying? I read her name on the obituary page before the week is out.
Arthur and I get sent to a shooting off Albany Avenue. We climb up a narrow staircase in an abandoned house to find a man lying on the floor, holding his bloody groin, where a close-range shotgun blast has left a gory mess. “Is it going to work? Can they make it work?” he moans as we race him to the trauma room. I try not to look the bloody crater lake where his manhood used to be. At the scene, the cop asked him if the shooting was over drugs. He shook his head and moaned. Later that night, while the surgeons work to put his penis back on, a woman comes in with a thumb missing and powder burns on her hand. Seems that in her rage at him, she held her hand a little too close over the edge of the sawed-off gun. Change comes quickly. One moment there, the next gone.
Our company is being sold to a large national medical transportation company, so everyone is a little on edge. Change, which can be good, is also unsettling. People are worried about their jobs. Our union president tells us we have nothing to worry about, but that doesn’t help much. I believe our jobs are safe. What worries me is the working conditions. Now I arrive in the morning, check out my ambulance, get on the road, do the calls, and no one bothers me. I worry we will have to wear new uniforms with ties that make us look like fast-food managers, and supervisors will write us up if our shoes aren’t shined. Every time it gets slow and I stretch out in the back of the ambulance, a supervisor will knock on the back window, chew me out, write me up. They will change my schedule to Monday through Friday nine-to-five. They will make me shave my mustache, trim my hair. Maybe they’ll take a dislike to me, and then I will get fired. It’s a scary thing to lose control. I am in many ways in my prime. I am healthy, strong. I love what I do, but in this job you see the arbitrariness of life, how brutal it can be. You try to think it can’t happen to you, but you know any day, month, year, your number could come up. It’s a matter of when, not if.
A week goes by and it’s the next Thursday and Pam is working with me again. She tells me about the restaurant her boyfriend took her to and the movie they saw afterward. Her boyfriend is a new medic, a nice twenty-two-year-old kid. She talks about him in a way I wish a girlfriend talked about me, with a sort of openness about the future and belief in good things to come. If he wants to go to California, she says, that’d be great. We’re young, we can try it out. I think if he doesn’t ask her to marry him soon, he is a major knucklehead, though I have to admit, at twenty-two I wouldn’t have been able to recognize the traits I see in her now. At twenty-two, I wanted a thousand women. At forty, I sometimes think about the women in my past who I let slip by the wayside. As she tells me about the cruise she and her boyfriend are planning to take this summer, I feel some regret about my old college sweetheart and how we should have gone on more vacations together. I remember one we did go on, after we had already decided to break up. We went to New Hampshire to climb Mount Washington. It took us five hours to get to the top, and she wanted to stop several times along the way, but I kept us going. Can’t quit, can’t quit. I knew as long as we kept moving we’d get there. When we finally did get to the mountaintop, we were both thrilled. She was so glad I had kept us moving all the way to the summit. I had brought a small bottle of champagne, and we drank it out of plastic glasses. Though it was warm, it was great, sitting up there above the sparse clouds, looking down on all the world. What a thing we had done—climbing this mountain. I still have the pictures from that day. In one, she is coming up a rise and stumbling slightly, but she looks up at the camera, her cheeks flushed, a hopeful smile. She must have been twenty-two then—she looks like a little girl to me now, her whole life ahead of her. We rode the train down and then spent a few days at the beach before she left me off at my parents’ house in Connecticut, then drove back to Virginia where she would go on to law school, and eventually, a house of her own, a kid, and a husband, and I would head west for adventures of my own.
Pam settles into studying her paramedic textbook. I sit there and watch the nurses crossing the street to get coffee. It’s a slow day for us. Then suddenly the wind picks up and all hell breaks loose. MVAs, trees falling, calls go out all over the city. Car 453 does a call where a tree has fallen on a car, crushing the passenger compartment, but miraculously just missing the driver, who has only bruises. We are sent to an elderly housing complex where we find a fifty-seven-year-old woman who has been knocked down in the parking lot of her apartment complex by a sudden fierce gust of wind. She has fractured the orbit of her right eye and her eye is already purple and swollen shut. She is on her knees. “Lord, help me,” she says over and over. “I can’t see. I can’t see. Why can’t I see? Oh, Lord help me.”
We take her to Saint Francis, which is overcrowded with patients, all rooms full, hallways, too. People with oxygen masks on, people with IV fluids running, people who look mostly dead, people who look scared, some lying on wooden backboards from motor vehicle accidents. A ragged man in four-point restraints shouts and curses: “Get me the fuck out of here, you bastards.”
We do an MVA and another fall, then at six o’clock we are sent priority one for a man with chest pain in a car on Collins Street, just blocks from the hospital. A new two-door Oldsmobile has run up on the sidewalk, the front bumper touching the fire hydrant, right side against a fence. A crowd yells at us as we cross the street. “He’s locked in there.”
I look in at him. He is a man in his sixties in a suit and tie with an overcoat on. He is looking straight ahead. He is breathing. His eyes blink occasionally. The doors are all locked.
“Break the window, break the window,” a man shouts.
When I knock on the glass, I note a small amount of eye movement to the side. “This is bullshit,” I say to Pam. “It’s a psych.”
I hit the glass again. His eyes dart toward me, then forward again.
I keep looking at the man and start thinking. “I know this guy,” I say. “I’ve seen him before. I did this guy in West Hartford. We had to break into his house.”
“Yeah, I was with you,” Pam says.
“That’s right. It’s him. Look at him.”
“He does look like him.”
“Call HPD, tell them we need an officer so we can break the window.”
She comes back and says there’s one on the way.
The officer is already pulling up. “What do you got?” he asks.
“He’s okay. It’s a psych,” I say. “He won’t open up.”
“I’ll take care of it,” he says. He takes a small metal tool, known as a window punch. He presses it against the backseat window. Nothing happens. He swears, adjusts the screw, then presses it again against the glass. It shatters. He knocks the glass away with his glove. It is a long reach to the lock, so I step in since my arms are longer. I grab a flashlight from the man’s backseat and use it to hit against the lock with Pam giving me directions. “More to the side,” she says, as the flashlight bangs against the automatic button. The lock pops.
I open the door and say, “Hey, how are you? What’s going on?”
He keeps looking forward. I lift his left hand off his knee. I feel slight muscle resistance. I let his hand drop. It goes right back to his knee. “We’re going to take you out of here and take you to the hospital,” I say. I grab under his arms while Pam gets the legs. He doesn’t resist and we lift him onto the stretcher. With the cop watching me, I remove his wallet from his back pocket. I look at his license. Sure enough, it is the same guy. Same name, same address in West Hartford.
“Good ID,” Pam says.
“We had to break into the guy’s house in West Hartford last week,” I say to the cop, “and he’s fine. Now we break into this car. Same guy.”
The cops shakes his head. “Some world.”
We get him in back of our ambulance and get his coat off and work him over. He’s hypertensive, but everything else checks out. He just looks straight ahead, saying nothing. When I shine a light in his eyes, he tries to roll his eyes back into his head. “Don’t play with me,” I say.
I put a tourniquet on his arm and look for a vein. “Look, he’s got some other IV scabs here.”
“Maybe he’s been into the hospital a few other times since then,” Pam says.
“Where’d you get these other marks?” I ask. “You’ve been back to the hospital since we took you in?”
He says nothing.
“Why won’t you talk to me?”
I have Pam drive on a three to Hartford, while I do the IV.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” I say. “I know you’re in there. What’s going on?”
He sits back, his arms crossed, and stares at his chest.
I plug the IV with a saline lock, get off his legs, and check his blood sugar—normal.
He doesn’t say a word all the way in. I’m thinking again: What a story. Break into his house in West Hartford and now break into his car in Hartford. Same guy. Imagine that.
At triage, I take the nurse aside and tell her the story of today and last week. She tells us to put him in room ten for a brief medical evaluation, before they move him to the psych section.
In room ten, we move him over to the bed by lifting him on the sheet, then settling him down. He doesn’t look at us, holds his head down, mute.
In the car, Pam says, “The nurse thought he’d been in there a couple times this week. I think he’s got some kind of major depression going on. Maybe his wife died or something.”
“Maybe,” I say. “I guess I was being a little unsympathetic.”
“No, you treated him okay.”
But I’m thinking I didn’t even ask him what was going on in his life.
That night as I drive home I think about how at times I have thought of just pulling over to the side of the road and stopping, going no farther, but I’ve always kept on, never even slowing. I mean, what would I do at the side of the road? Who would come for me? Where would they take me? What would become of me? And how would my life ever get so bad that I would come to that place of complete despair? Could that ever happen to me?
I still see him there, sitting in the bed in room ten, his tie on, his head tilted to the right as if he’d like to lay his head on his shoulder, but he is too tired to move it any farther, his eyes staring off.
Presidential Debate
President Clinton is coming to Hartford. He will be debating Senator Bob Dole at the Bushnell on Sunday night. Daniel Tauber, the chief paramedic, asks me if I am available for overtime. He needs to know right away so the Secret Service can start a background check. This Sunday is my twentieth high school reunion at the prep school I went to in New Hampshire, and I have been debating whether or not I am going to go. My friend Brad, who, despite being in the middle of a hotly contested election battle for political office in Massachusetts, wants me to go, and has cleared his schedule so we can go together. Unlike him, I have never gone back. It was a hard time for me. I did poorly, and was proud just to have survived it.
In the assembly hall they had an oil portrait of a former headmaster. There is a quotation engraved in gold at the bottom from some address he’d given to a graduating class, telling them to go out into the world and win victories for civilization, then come back to “show us your scars.” Exeter was a school of achievers. The quarterly bulletin was filled with boasts of alumni about their promotions, law, medical, and Ph.D degrees received, honors and awards, children, countries traveled to, mountains climbed. Compared to them I sometimes feel an emptiness, a sense of failure like I haven’t made the mark I should have.
“You ought to go,” Brad says when I call him. “We’ll have a good time. You’re a paramedic—that’s excellent. You help people. You save lives. You should walk tall in that room. And if they don’t think that’s great, well we don’t have to hang out with anyone. We’ll get a six-pack, and go sit down by the river, and tell stories.”
I don’t know. I just don’t feel comfortable with the idea. Exeter shaped me by teaching me to lock my feelings and disappointments inside and to go on despite them—valuable lessons for a paramedic. But I don’t think I’m ready to face it. Besides, now I have an excuse. Paramedic to the president. I picture myself standing just off the stage, a witness to history. Suddenly the president has a dizzy spell, he collapses. I rush onstage. The TV cameras whirl. The press snaps shots for the covers of Newsweek, Time, People. I apply the defibrillator, blast him. Boom. I strap the tourniquet on his arm, fire a line right. Get the flashback. Hook up the line. Running like gangbusters, as Arthur says. Fire in some epi. Some lidocaine. Sinus on the monitor. I get pulses back. The president wakes up. I help him to his feet, give him a glass of water, and he’s ready to go on with the debate. Later in his State of the Union address, he recognizes me from the podium. I’m sitting up in the balcony with Hillary. I wave to the nationwide TV audience. Aw shucks, just doing my job.
I show up Sunday night at our base and find I am working with Scott Hansen. We will be a double paramedic crew. We are not covering the president. Daniel has that responsibility. Two other medics have Dole. We are to be stationed at the Bushnell, and think we will be in charge of Hillary. We drive down to the Bushnell, but all the roads are blocked off. At each checkpoint, we are sent in another direction. We end up parked by the Arch in Bushnell park, a half mile from the hall.
“But we have security clearance,” I say to the officer.
“Sorry, they want you right here. You’ll get called if you’re needed.”
We sit there for hours. I sit in the car, my legs cramped, watching a stream of people in expensive suits and dresses with their debate tickets—purchased by huge donations—trying to get through the checkpoint, and all being sent somewhere else.
A supervisor comes by to check on us, and says not even Daniel is covering the president. They’ve been told if anything happens to him, they’ll throw him in the limo and race up to Saint Francis, which is on alert. We’re just for show.
When the debate starts, I listen for a while, but I get tired of the stock lines and phrases. I wish I smoked. I’d stand outside and have a cig and look up at the moon. I think about Brad up at the reunion. I think while the others are having drinks at the reception, he’s probably walking by himself out on the athl
etic fields, thinking about his life, and how twenty years later he is where he is, a father of four, a husband, a man trying to make the world better, trying to live up to the great expectations placed upon him. He is a direct descendent of William Bradford, who stepped off the Mayflower onto Plymouth Rock. His grandfather was governor of Massachusetts. His father, a captain of industry. He is thirty-nine, a defeated congressional candidate, in debt, struggling to meet his mortgage, and in a tight, ugly election battle. I know he believes he can win, but the specter of another election defeat, the horrible feeling of aloneness has to be there somewhere. If he does lose, if the voters turn their backs on him, what will he do? How will he keep on fighting? Walking over those athletic fields, he will remember the boy he was, how he dirtied his jersey on the football field, dreamed the big dreams.
I think about my own life. I am not where I thought I would be—not in my life and not here tonight—a mile down the street from the big event, outside the barricade, instead of being up there behind the podium, the leader of the free world. But even though I will never be president or close to it, it does not mean that I have stopped trying to be special. So I won’t be on the cover of Time this week. I won’t get to put an IV in the president. And I suspect that if I were up at the reunion, few would look twice at me if I walked into the reception room. But I do know that if Brad and I were sitting together by the Exeter river, sharing a cold six-pack, we’d raise our beers and toast each other. Warriors. That’d be enough.
TROUBLED MAN
“Looking at me, I may look fine, but I got problems, I tell you, I got a storm brewing.”
Troubled Man
We’re sent to a rehab center for a man with anxiety who needs to be seen at Mount Sinai ER. A tall man in a bright blue sweatsuit is waiting at the door for us, along with an administrator in a white shirt and tie. While my partner, Mark Rozyn, goes inside to get the neccessary transportation papers, I escort the man to the ambulance and have him take a seat on the bench. I stand outside the back door. I have already teched three calls tonight, so this one is Mark’s. “That place sucks, man,” the man says to me. “I mean they do the detox part fine, but when a man’s having the problems I’m having they can’t handle it. It’s about fucking time they got me out of there. I should have been out days ago. I’m a troubled man. I mean, you may look at me, and I may look fine on the outside, but inside, you don’t know. You don’t know. I could be like the motherfucker that done killed all those people down at the lottery. I’m sure he looked just fine till he pulled that gun out and started wasting people. You don’t know what’s inside. It’s like nature. Nature’s calm as can be, then boom, along come that El Niño. You got houses toppling, mountains falling into the sea, rainwater washing people away, hurricane, thunder, earthquakes, tornado. I feel like that inside. I got to get some help. I got me an El Niño brewing right inside, and you just don’t know. Looking at me, I may look fine, but I got problems, I tell you, I got a storm brewing. I’m a troubled man.”
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