The triage nurse has us put her in a wheelchair and we take her to the waiting room. We tell her to listen up for her name being called. She’ll probably be seen by a physician assistant in Med-Express where the nonacute patients are seen.
We run into Rebecca again. She is bringing in a patient with CHF. She has the heart monitor over her shoulder and is carrying an IV bag. I help her wheel the man down the hall. She gives a crisp, concise report to the nurse, then puts her hand on the patient’s arm and says, “Good luck, Mr. Clark. They’ll take good care of you here.”
Watching her, I think that I carry with me what others have taught. Now I have passed some of it on.
* * *
Before the day is out, we’ve done twelve calls, helped twelve people. I sit back at the base catching up on my paperwork when Jackie Lackey, who I turn 471 over to, laughs at my hair, which is all mussed up. “Hard day, huh?” She gets out a camera and starts snapping a picture of me.
I smile. I feel like a medic again. I love my job.
MEMORY
I raise my eyes and take in this room, this sight, these people.
Joe
He’s a double amputee sitting in his bathrobe in an old wheelchair, wearing a World War II army cap. “Shut up, you old witch,” he yells at his wife, an old ghostly looking woman in a tattered bathrobe. “You’re the one who gave me this damn chest pain.”
The apartment is also old, with barely any furniture and a heavy layer of dust over the counters and floor.
“Fifty-two years I’ve put up with you. Now get out of here and mind your own business.”
“Where exactly is the chest pain?” I ask.
“Right here. Like somebody stabbed me. That woman’s going to be the death of me.”
“Fifty-two years, she must be doing something right,” I say as I put a nasal cannula on him to get some oxygen into his system.
My partner has taken the wife into the other room and is getting a list of the medications the patient is on.
“Two years ago she went into the hospital for blood clots. Seventeen months they kept her there. I got used to being a bachelor. Besides, she isn’t right in the head anymore. You old witch!” he calls.
“Calm down and breathe easy,” I say. His pressure is a little high and his pulse a little fast.
In the ambulance, he says he is feeling better. I have put in a saline lock in case his pressure bottomed out after I gave him a nitro, but since he is feeling better, I now hold off on the nitro.
His heart rhythm is a normal sinus with only a sporadic PVC.
I ask him about other medical problems. He says he had a heart attack in 1963, and lost his legs at Guadalcanal in the Pacific.
“I read that book, Guadalcanal Diary. That was some battle, huh?”
“Great book,” he says. “We chased those nips from the Phillippines to Okinawa. Lost a lot of good men.”
“No doubt. You fought for freedom and you won.”
“You got that right.”
“Feeling better?”
“I think this oxygen is working. And that needle helped too, I suspect.”
“Good.”
“I know a thing or two about medicine, all the time I spent in the hospital. When I was in the Pacific, there was a woman there at the hospital I was in who gave birth to a kid had three knees.”
“Three knees?”
“A right knee, a left knee, and a wee knee,” he says.
“That’s good,” I say.
“I knew a cook there, caught a rare bird, a rhea bird, ever heard of one of those?”
“I think so, sort of like a peacock, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. He didn’t like the color though, so he decided he’d dye it blue. Guess what happened.”
“Tell me.”
He tries to keep a straight face but breaks out into a grin. “He got dye-a-rhea.”
“That’s good. You’re killing me.”
In the hospital, the staff knows him. “Hey, Joe, how are you today?”
“A little chest pain,” he says, “but these fine boys have taken good care of me, feeling much better. We’re having a good old time, isn’t that right, boys?”
“You got it,” I say.
They send us to room ten, bed one.
“First-class accommodations,” he says as I wheel him into the empty room.
I am finishing my written report, talking to him as I write, when a nurse comes in to give him a twelve lead EKG.
“EKG,” he says, “I had an E-G-G this morning. Does that count for anything?”
“That’s a good one,” the nurse says.
“I know a thing or two about medicine,” he says. “Why, when I was in the hospital in the Pacific, there was a woman who gave birth to a baby with three knees.”
Out in the car, I say to Arthur, “As much as I like the medical challenges, I like the people best.”
“They can make your day,” he says.
“They kill me sometimes.”
Snake Girl
We get called for an insect bite on Capen Street. The apartment is dirty and cluttered. A woman leads us through the living room. I see a cage with a small rabbit in it, munching on a carrot. It looks up at me. Its eyes meet mine as I pass. In the dark hallway there are two small children in diapers, sitting quietly against the wall. I just miss stepping on one. “In here,” the woman says.
A woman in her twenties with long, thick hair to her waist sits on the bed, rubbing a spot on her leg. The wound looks like teeth marks. The skin is slightly swollen.
“What bit you?” I ask.
“He bit me,” she says. She points to the dresser.
“Holy …” I say. There is a huge snake curled up in a glass aquarium.
“He bit me before, but I think some of his teeth are stuck in me this time.”
“What kind of snake?”
“He’s a boa constrictor. He’s been moody lately.”
“They’re not poisonous, are they? They just like to squeeze things, right?”
“No, they’re not poisonous. I think he’s hungry. I haven’t been feeding him too much. I don’t want him getting too big, now that the babies are around. He’s over seven feet now. I don’t know what I’m going to do with him.”
“What does he eat?”
“Rats.”
“From around here?”
“No, I get them at the pet store. They cost me three ninety-nine each. He eats fifteen at a time. Hamsters are six dollars. It’s getting expensive.”
“Is that what the rabbit’s for?”
“He wants him. He knows he’s out there, that’s why he’s so wild lately. Getting so I can’t take him out.”
“You take him out a lot?”
“I take him out every day. We sit outside or walk down the street. He likes it when it’s steamy, when the sun comes out bright right after the rain.”
“What hospital do you want to go to?”
“Hartford. They took care of me last time.”
Coming down the hall, I have to step over the kids again. “Just step on them,” the other woman says. “They get out of the way.”
“I love snakes ever since I was a little girl,” the woman says as we ride to the hospital. “I learned about them in science class. I like their skin and I like the way they hold me. I read about them at night. I know everything about them. I got him when he was just nine inches. Cost me four hundred and fifty dollars. I had to go all the way down to New York City. I got the papers for him.”
“When you feed him all those rats, how does he eat them?”
“I dump them all in, and he squeezes them, then he eats them. Takes maybe an hour.”
“Do you charge admission when you feed him?”
“No, but I got friends who like to watch.”
“What do your kids think about him?”
“They’re my sister’s kids. I don’t got kids.”
She is quiet for a while.
“You see that m
ovie Anaconda?” I ask.
“Yeah, I was the first one, the first one in line when that come to town. I seen it ten times. I love that movie. It takes place in the jungle. I’ve read about that place. They got all kinds of animals. I like to go there someday. All the trees and birds. I dream about it at night.” Her eyes get a far-off look as she sits there thinking about a place ten thousand miles from the city streets. “Someday I like to have a monkey,” she says.
Polish
We get called for an unknown at Charter Oak Housing, an apartment tower for the elderly. We find a tiny old woman throwing up into a bucket. “No hospital,” she says in a thick Polish accident. “No hospital.”
The story we get is her daughter, who is an alcoholic, was kicked out of the apartment by the management that morning for being too drunk. Her neighbors are worried the old woman has not been getting enough to eat, and that she is very weak. She has stomach cancer and is very frail.
“No hospital,” she says. “No hospital, please.”
Joan Dowgielewicz, a new paramedic I am precepting, says for many old Polish people, the hospital is the place they go to die.
She seems alert and oriented, though it is hard to feel a pulse or hear a blood pressure because her arms are bent from osteoarthritis. I am uncomfortable leaving her, so I decide we are going to take her. “Hospital,” I say. “Good place. You go, get better, come home.”
“No hospital,” she says. “No hospital, please.”
We stand her up, and half persuade, half carry her to the stretcher. She does not resist in body. I feel bad about taking her, but this is a case that social service needs to look at.
We wheel her out into the corridor, where her neighbors have gathered. I talk to them briefly, and they express concern for her health, worry that her daughter cannot take care of her.
The patient sees one woman coming out of an apartment door and starts to say something to her in Polish.
“There, there,” the neighbor says, brushing the old woman’s face.
“You speak Polish?” Arthur asks her.
“Yes.”
“Tell her we’re going to take her to the hospital, get her checked out, then hopefully she’ll be able to come back.”
The woman nods, then, looking at the old woman, says very slowly in a loud voice with a pause between each word, “They are going to Take You to the Hospital.”
Arthur and I start laughing. She looks at us, offended.
“You said you speak Polish,” Arthur says.
“She understands,” the woman says defensively. “She understands English.”
We try to stop laughing.
“She understands what I was saying. She understands.”
“Thank you,” Arthur says.
We get in the elevator, shaking our heads.
“She understands,” I say.
I look then at the old woman. She sits quietly, her dark eyes peering out of her old wrinkled head. Art pats her on the hand. “You’ll be okay,” he says.
Mr. and Mrs. Jones
We’re called for an unknown on Vine. The guard asks what apartment we’re going to, then he rolls his eyes and says, “They always going at it. He must be drinking again.” We knock hard on the door and a young man answers. “My mother called for you,” he says.
“Is that the po-lice?” she cries. “Take him out of here. He threatened to kill me.”
She is an old woman wearing a Diana Ross wig, sitting in an old armchair.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“He been drinking again. I got asthma and high blood pressure.”
A cop arrives and we learn the culprit, her husband, is in the bedroom.
“He ain’t taken a bath for months. He give me a venereal disease. I got to take a medication for it. Forty years I been putting up with him. I can’t take it no more.”
We open the door cautiously and see a man lying in bed, the covers pulled up to his neck. He looks at us as we step in. “What do you want?” he says.
“What’s going on?” the cop says.
“Nothing. I’m sleeping.”
“You been drinking?”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Your wife says you threatened to kill her.”
“I did, ’cause she’s been driving me crazy. She never shut up.”
“He give me a venereal disease,” she shouts.
I can smell the alcohol on his breath.
“Why don’t you get up and come with us?”
He throws the sheets off; he is completely naked.
“Where you going to take me?”
I look at the cop and he looks at me. “To the hospital,” I say, “So you can sober up and get cleaned up.”
“I ain’t going nowhere.”
“We’ll get you something hot to eat,” I say.
He looks at me and at the cop, then says, “Now wait a minute. You a white man. I’m naked and this is my own house. Get the fuck out of my house.”
“He been drinking all day. Catting about. He ain’t never take a bath. And I got asthma,” she calls.
“Why don’t you put your pants on?” the cop says.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” he says. “I don’t want no white men in my house when I’m standing here naked. Get the fuck out of my bedroom.”
Two other cops arrive. I step back out of the room and let them handle it.
“I got asthma,” the woman says, “and he don’t give me a minute’s sleep when he’s been drinking. Forty years I put up with him. No more.”
The cops finally convince him to go or be arrested, and while he prefers to be arrested, they prefer he go with me. We take him to Saint Francis, where they put him on a bed in the back hall and restrain him. He’s still there the next morning when I come in to work. “How you doing this morning?” I ask.
He doesn’t recognize me. He’s sober now. “Okay,” he says. “Do you know where I could get some orange juice?”
Several months later, we’re sent for a difficulty breathing on Bedford Street. A man opens the door and says, “It’s my wife, she’s got asthma.”
“Hey, I know you. Don’t you live on Vine?”
“We moved,” he says respectfully.
It’s the same woman, sitting by the bed. She is in only mild distress. She has some wheezes, so I give her a treatment.
He is on the phone. “Hello, doctor. It’s my wife. She’s real bad. The ambulance is here. We’re going to take her to the hospital.… Okay, okay,” he says.
“What are you bothering him with?” she says. “Put that phone down and bring me my shoes.” She looks at me and shakes her head.
He runs about the house, getting her pocketbook, shoes, and a sweater as we set her on the stretcher and bring her down to the ambulance.
“What a pain in the ass,” she says. “Forty years I put up with him.”
He hands her her pocketbook. She opens it, takes out an envelope, and removes several twenty-dollar bills, which she stuffs in her bra. “Give this back to him,” she says, offering me the envelope.
“He seems to treat you all right,” I say.
“He’s not so bad, I suppose,” she says.
“How you doing, honey?” he calls from the front.
Memory
In Bellevue Square, we are sent for an infant with a high temperature. As we park in the potholed lot, I notice perhaps sixty or more empty quart-sized bottles lined up in a neat square on a patch of ground between the buildings where only a few strands of grass grow. The sight puzzles me. If someone is collecting bottles, how come they’re not in a shopping cart? I put it out of my mind and we go into the building, walk up the graffiti-strewn stairs to the apartment. The husband sits on the couch wearing a bandana around his head and holding a baby. “She ain’t eating today and she feel awful hot,” he says. “I know something wrong. I’m trying to take care of her best I can, but I know I had to call for the doctor.”
“Where’s the baby’s mother?”
“She don’t live here. She got a drug problem, and I ain’t going to have that around my little girl. I set the law on that.”
We walk down to the ambulance. My partner points out the bottles to the father.
“My homey got shot there last year.”
“Was he dealing drugs?”
“Innocent bystander. We were out there the other night tipping our forties to him.”
“Tipping your forties?”
“Drinking beer. I take a drink for myself, then tip some down into the ground for my friend. I know he’d do the same for me. He ain’t forgot.”
Where Every Day Is Like Sunday
“I feel like something’s pressing against my heart,” she says.
Mrs. Mays, an old woman in her seventies, sits in an armchair, her breathing labored.
“Lift up your tongue,” I say, placing the small white pill in her mouth. “This will help the pain, and your breathing.”
“Thank you,” she says.
Arthur comes back with the stair chair we will use to carry her outside and down the creaky front porch steps to our ambulance, parked on this street in the north end of Hartford, where two weeks before we’d done a drug-related shooting.
We are ready to lift her onto our chair when a man comes in the front door and asks the family, “How is she?”
“They just getting ready to take her to Saint Francis. She having trouble with her breathing again.”
He is in his fifties, a dark man in a suit and tie. He looks at us. “Do we have time to say a prayer?”
“Go ahead,” I say.
They gather hands. Arthur and I step back, but the man says, “Would you like to join us?”
Neither of us are churchgoing, but we step forward and join them. I hold the hand of Mrs. Mays and the hand of her granddaughter, a pretty, modest woman in her thirties.
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