Diamond in the Rough

by Peter Canning

  “Just me and my girl,” the man holding his back said. “And Charlie over there, he was in the car too.”

  “My back hurts something powerful,” Charlie said, grinning.

  “Don’t forget about me,” the other man said. “I think it’s my neck, I know it’s my neck.”

  Fred looked dubious. He knocked on the window of the Oldsmobile. The man lowered the window. “You all right?” Fred asked. “Any injuries?”

  “I’m fine,” the man said. “I asked for the police.”

  “I’ll check on them for you.”

  Into his radio, Fred said, “453 to HPD, I need an ETA on the officer for the MVA at Homestead and Magnolia.”

  “Is anyone hurt?”

  “Well, let’s just say several want to go to the hospital, so I may need another rig. I’ll let you know. We’re just going to need an officer.”

  “He’s on his way.”

  “Yo, they was in the car too,” the man said as two other men, who had come out of the crack house to see what was going on, now began holding their backs.

  “The car doesn’t fit six people,” Fred said.

  “We was trying for one of them Guinness Records. See how many we could fit when he slammed us.”

  “We all getting paid!”

  “Okay, listen,” Fred said, “if you’re going to the hospital, here’s how it’s going to happen. We’re going to have to put collars on your neck and lay you down and strap you to a board. It’s protocol. You can expect to be on the board for a long time and for it to be uncomfortable, but if you’re going, that’s how it’s going to be.”

  “Wait a minute; let me check my calendar.” The man mimicked checking an invisible calendar book, then proudly announced, “All appointments clear!”

  “We’re going to need two more ambulances,” Fred said into the radio, “low priority.” To me, he said, “Yank the stretcher. It’s board-and-collar time.”

  Board and collaring was all about c-spine immobilization. We had practiced it endlessly in our class. What you do is put a collar on a person’s neck, and then strap them very tightly to a hard spinal board in order to keep their spinal column in line. If they had a spinal injury, particularly in their neck, allowing them to move around before they got an x-ray to clear them of spinal injury could cause paralysis—at least that’s what they taught us in school.

  “Who wants to be first?” Fred announced.

  “Ladies first, ladies first,” the woman said.

  “Okay, lie down on the board.”

  “Lie down? You got twenty dollars?” the man asked, while the others continued to laugh.

  “That’s all right,” the woman said. “I’m going to get paid later. I’m going to get paid at the hospital. The city going to pay.”

  “Lie down,” Fred said.

  In class, if someone was up walking, we were taught to hold the board against their back, buckle it on them standing, and then lower them down. Fred just had her lie down on the board, which lay on the stretcher. At his direction, I tied only two straps around her instead of the five we used in class. He applied a commercial head bed, a device that held her head straight between two Styrofoam blocks, and then started to secure it with a long strip of duct tape.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. I went in the back of the rig, and came back with two 4x4s, which I placed over the woman’s eyebrows, then nodded for him to apply the tape.

  He looked at me like I was peculiar. “Not on this planet,” he said. He removed the 4x4s, and then taped the duct tape right across the woman’s forehead. He pressed the tape against her eyebrows. “We need to make it nice and secure,” he said, and then he winked at me.

  Okay, I get it, I thought. This way when they took the tape off, her eyebrows would come off with it. This was Fred’s “price” for faking an injury.

  By that time, the second and third ambulances were arriving, along with a police car and a TV truck from Channel 30.

  ***

  Ten hours later I had made it through my first shift. It had been an eventful day. Besides the motor vehicle, we had done two dialysis transfers, two drunks, a heroin overdose, a foot pain, a migraine headache and a cardiac arrest, where I got to do CPR for the first time. It was an old man found not breathing while sitting in his armchair on his porch. He was flat line on the monitor, and slightly cool to the touch, but Tom Spencer, the medic who was there before us, worked him anyway, putting a tube in his throat, an IV in his neck and pushing lots of drugs. “Well, you killed your first patient,” he said to me later as we wrote up our paperwork. I was ready. I showed him my belt. “Already notched it,” I said.

  “Hey, you’re all right,” he said. “You’re a sick fuck, but you’re all right.”

  Before we left for the bar, Fred presented me with my very own “EMS in the Jungle” tee-shirt to wear. They wouldn’t let us wear our uniform shirts off duty; besides, I had gotten puke on mine. “First round’s on you,” Fred said. “It’s a tradition.”

  Later at the bar, Fred told the story of our first call, “I don’t even know if any of them were in the car when the guy backed up,” he said, “but by the time we were leaving, they had half the neighborhood out there holding their backs, lying on the ground, flopping like fish, drooling and shouting, ‘We going to get paid! We going to paid!’ Isn’t that right, Timmy?”

  And they all looked at me.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “He was there. They were all shouting, ‘We going to get paid!’ Now tomorrow you can walk down Magnolia Street and see half the folks there don’t have eyebrows.”

  I sat there sipping my beer, in wonderment that these stories of the street, about which I had once wondered if they were completely made up, were in fact as bizarre and crazy as they sounded. Now I was a part of the compendium.

  “I didn’t know you worked in the city?” Mindy said to me, the first words I think she had ever spoken to me. “I guess I should have known from your shirt.”

  I muttered that I did.

  “His first day,” Fred said. “He’s still a newbie, but he’s got potential. He listens to me, he’ll do fine, forget all the book crap they teach in school, and learn the way of the street. Hey, there we are now.”

  And up on the TV, there was the Channel 30 reporter standing in front of the scene, talking about an accident that had sent six people to the hospital, all fortunately with what turned out to be minor injuries. They showed me and Fred lifting one of our patients into the back of the rig.

  Me on TV.

  Chapter 5

  When we covered downtown we often parked under the highway by the train station. It was cool and out of the sun and if you wanted to get in back and stretch out on the cot, you were out of public sight. Fred even used the ambulance as a shield to take a piss against the highway column. On the cement wall to our left, guarding the entrance to the railroad underpass, was a giant billboard of the Governor. Beside his big grinning head was the slogan: “Thompson—Always looking out for you.” From where we were parked you could look past Union Station and the taxi stand and up the hill at the Governor’s office—the Capitol building—a massive gothic structure with a shiny gold dome.

  “He’s a good dude,” Fred said. “My uncle knows him. He does handiwork on his cottage. Says he’s a regular guy. Drinks beer, plays poker, beats his wife.”

  “Beats his wife?”

  “I’m just kidding—that’s a load of crap the Democrats were trying to smear him with. I guess there was a 911 call or something and the paper wanted to get the tapes, but they couldn’t get them. Some Freedom of Information crap, I don’t know. They never proved anything. My uncle says he’s regular folks. They grew up in the same town. He says the man smoked pot in high school, had long hair, and liked to chase tail. That’s the kind of guy you want in there—not like the last guy—a millionaire who raised everybody’s taxes and cut all the programs.”

  “Does he pay your uncle well?”

  �
��He doesn’t pay him. My uncle works for a construction company and the company pays my uncle. My uncle says they don’t charge him.”

  “There’s a deal for you. I should have asked them to rebuild my neighbor’s garage.”

  “That’s right, you little pyro. I’m sure he’d rebuild it for you for free if you had juice like the Governor. Always helps to have the Governor in your corner. Uh-oh. Here comes Hershel. We got to split.”

  An unshaven man with a dirty UCONN Lady Huskies jersey walked toward us. He came to my window as Fred turned on the engine. “I need to go to ADRC,” he said. “I need detox.” He had open sores on his arms and face. There was alcohol on his breath.

  “You’ve got to call 911,” Fred said.

  “I just asked an ambulance before and they took me. You got a radio, right?”

  “New rules. You have to activate 911.”

  “I don’t have a phone.”

  “There’s one in the train station.”

  “I got to call?”

  “Yeah, we’re an on-line dedicated car. We can only go where they dispatch us.”

  “Give me a quarter.”

  “We’re broke. We don’t get paid till Friday.” Fred took a chug of his soda. “I’m sure someone down at the station can give you a quarter. You call, and ask to go, and they’ll send someone.”

  The man looked back at the station. “Just use your radio, man.”

  “I might, but we’re on a call. Now stand back.” Fred hit the lights on, put the ambulance in gear, and then blasted the air horn as he rolled forward.

  Hershel cussed. I saw him give Fred the finger in the mirror as we pulled away.

  “That guy’s got scabies,” Fred said. “He’s not getting in my ambulance.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Fred turned up the hill where we approached the sprawling Hartford Insurance Company. He shut the lights down after we’d gone around the traffic at the light. He picked the mike up. “857, can we go to Saint Fran for a personal?”

  “Okay, make it area 3. 843, go down to the tunnel.”

  Fred laughed. “They’ll be happy when Hershel calls. Suckers!”

  “857, you’re going to have to wait on that personal. I’ve got a call on Edgewood. Lift assist.”

  Fred swore. “Not again. That lady needs to go to a nursing home. I can’t believe this. We just picked her up yesterday.”

  Mrs. Green was an old woman who lived by herself on Edgewood Street. She had elephant legs, and was always short of breath, despite her home oxygen tubing that she wore in her nose all the time. By her bed was a piss bucket. She wore a medic alarm around her neck. She was always falling, and needed help getting back into bed. After picking her up, you’d often find feces on your gloves. It was the fourth time I’d picked her up and I hadn’t even been working there a month.

  “Time for you to get into a nursing home,” Fred said, standing over her, as he pulled on his gloves. “We can’t keep picking you up like this.”

  Her right leg was splayed out to the side and shorter than the other one.

  “Give me a hand,” Fred said, when I didn’t move to grab her under the arm like I had the other times.

  “Look at her leg,” I said. She was grimacing. I knelt down and pressed against her hips. She cried out. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Fred asked her to try to lift up her right leg. She couldn’t do it.

  “I guess we’re going to need to transport,” he said.

  “Just help me now, please, I’m all right,” the woman said. “Just help me up.”

  “No,” Fred said. “I think you broke your hip. We need to take you in; besides, you could use a checkup, maybe they can get you into a home. You shouldn’t be living like this. Get the stretcher,” he said to me.

  I came back with the stretcher and a scoop, which was a metal contraption that came apart at the ends so you could get it under a person and pick them up.

  “Leave it attached,” Fred said, “just extend it a notch. We’ll roll her on it.” I was learning that the thing that bothered me the most in this job was not the broken bones, the stinks and smells or the people who gamed the system; it was simply the grimace of pain on people’s faces. This woman was not a wuss like some of our patients, whining and faking their pain. I could tell when we rolled her on the scoop she was hurting in a quiet desperate way. She wasn’t comfortable on the cold steel, and we had to rock her some to get the straps in place because her girth hung off both sides of the scoop.

  “Mercy,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry for your pain,” I said.

  I thought about suggesting to Fred that we call for a medic, who carried morphine and could medicate her before we moved her to dull her pain, as I had seen Brett Salafia do on the one day I worked with a medic, staying late after my crew change because his partner had wrenched his back. But I didn’t suggest it because I knew Fred saw it as a mark of weakness to have to call for help, even though we didn’t carry the drugs like the medic cars did. Fred believed as long as you could get the patient to the hospital without their dying, you didn’t need to bother a medic; most of whom he said didn’t like to be bothered.

  Fred and I were still the best of friends and we had a ball together on the road and I was grateful for everything he showed me, but I sensed we had a different outlook on some things about the job. He had told me I was too new to speak up, so I always went along. Like Fred said, the street was different than the classroom.

  That afternoon, we got called up the hill to the Capitol Building. No sooner were we dispatched than we heard the supervisor’s fly car sign on.

  “Possible VIP call,” Fred said. “Be prepared to see some shit sniffing.”

  We were escorted into the building with its marble floors and high church-like ceilings. The Capitol Police led us onto the floor of the Senate chamber, where we found another large aged woman sitting in a chair, surrounded by people in suits and other uniformed officers, who treated her in a deferential way. I got that she was one of the Senators, and one of the higher ranking ones.

  Just then Ned Martinson, our chief paramedic, and Bob Falcone, the operations manager, showed up. “I’ll handle this one,” Ned said to Fred. Ned was close to forty, a bald man with a red face of someone with high blood pressure. He wore the white supervisor shirt with the gold badge, instead of the navy blue shirts with the silver badge the rest of us road warriors wore. He knelt down by the woman and, talking gently, inspected her from head to toe. “I think you fractured your hip,” he said.

  “Oh dear, that’s the last thing I need.” She managed a laugh despite her grimace. “Will I be back to vote tonight?”

  “You’re going to need an x-ray to confirm, but I suspect you’ll be spending the night at the hospital.”

  “Oh damn, you don’t have anything for the pain, do you?”

  “Are you allergic to any medicine?”

  “Yeah, the Democrats’ kind,” she said.

  And everyone laughed.

  She got ten milligrams of morphine before we loaded her, and Ned rode in the back with her while I followed behind in his fly car.

  At the hospital, she went right into room one. They had to pull out the old man with yellow eyes who was in there and put him in the hallway. Three doctors went in and the president of the hospital came down to say hello.

  “It’s all about who you know,” Fred said as I made up the stretcher and then wheeled it back down the hall past the long line of patients on stretchers.

  ***

  “Timmy and I took care of her,” Fred told our assembled crowd at the bar that night, as the news flashed a picture of the Legislative Leader. “She was feeling no pain. She was so high, I asked her if she was going to declare today State EMT Day. She said, hell, she’d declare it State EMT week. I should have slipped her a bill to sign pushing last call back an hour. I got a powerful thirst tonight. Mary Beth, another pitcher over here for my friends.”

  Just then
I saw one of the girls, Carrie, looking at me. She was stout, but she had a pretty smile and thick black hair in a page boy cut. Normally she was there with Jimmie Winslow, a Hartford cop we sometimes saw on our scenes. I had the presence of mind and enough beer in me to smile back, and toss a daring wink at her, and I thought I saw her smile and blush, though she turned to talk to the girl next to her.

  “You ought to ask her out,” Mindy whispered to me. “She just broke up with her boyfriend.”

  She left before I got the nerve, but I did notice her glancing back at me.

  I hoped it was not just the beer emboldening my imagination. I hoped through its haze there was actual possibility for me.

  I felt my world changing.

  Chapter 6

  I knew pretty early on that I was going to have some problems with Fred as a partner. What I liked best about the job—aside from firing up the lights and sirens and parting the traffic like Moses himself—was when I would come into a house and find a sick person there in need of help, and see them look up at me like they were seeing an angel. I felt needed. I was there to help—no matter who they were or what had happened to them. There was an instant connection between me and the patient that had nothing to do with anything either of us may have done in our lives. It didn’t matter who we were, where we were from, or how we felt about anything. We were bonded by the simple need for help and by the basic human desire to aid another in distress. Then Fred would go and make some rude comment like, “Did you call your doctor?”

  Now I know a frustrating part of the job was that too many people used us as a taxi ride to the ER whenever they had a sniffle instead of making an appointment and taking a cab to their private doctor if they had one, which many didn’t. But why embarrass a sick old grandmother in front of her family, particularly one who feels awful and is vomiting up her breakfast? Fred seemed to get off on an EMT power trip like he had some kind of authority over these people. I did not like watching as he made an old woman walk or wouldn’t let her go to the bathroom if she needed too. “You called 911. Let’s go. We came here lights and sirens. You have an emergency, you’re going now. You’re not the only sick person in town. There’s people getting shot, having strokes, heart attacks, cars wrecking, even babies not breathing. They call for an ambulance. Sorry, Charlie. They’re all busy. We go now or we don’t go at all. Make up your mind. Capisce? Now let’s go. Chop chop.” I guess I was more in the “Why make it harder on someone than it is?” camp than in the “Bust them because you can” modus of operation. Still, I kept my mouth shut because I was the newbie. Kept it zipped.