“Well, we love you and don’t want to see you hurt yourself.”
“I never said I’d hurt myself, you lying bitch,” he says.
“Remember when Marion was sick and she said she would have loved to have had someone to get her and help her, but she couldn’t ask?”
“I don’t care. I’m not talking to anybody.”
“Well, that’s why Peter and Toniah are here. They’re going to take you to Hartford Hospital and then to the IOL in Hartford, where there will be doctors who can help you.”
“Uh-huh,” he says. He crosses his hands over his chest. “I’m not going.”
“Well, we’re your parents, and we love you, and you don’t have a choice in this matter.”
“I’ll run away.”
“No,” she says. “We’re concerned about you. Just the other night, you took some of that Vivarin.”
“That’s legal. It’s like vitamin C.”
“It’s caffeine,” I say. “But it’s powerful stuff. I used to take it when I was in high school to stay up late studying. It exhausted me. I’d end up walking around with my fly open and not know it.”
The boy laughs but keeps his guard up.
“Christopher,” I say. “What your mom is talking about is a good thing. You’ve been through a tough time, and there are good people there who can help you.”
“I’m not going,” he says.
“Christopher,” she says. “They are going to take you.”
“I don’t care. I’m not going, I’ll fight.”
I am looking at him. He is a little wiry kid, but though I am nearly twice his size, I am not looking forward to a wrestling match, particularly in front of the boy’s mom.
“We do this all the time,” Toniah says. “We will restrain you. It’s your choice.”
He looks up at me, maybe weighing his odds.
“We don’t have to go lights and sirens. It’ll be a nice ride. Toniah will drive, and I’ll sit with you in the back. So you’ll come with us, okay?”
“Can I take my Walkman?” he says.
“Sure,” I say, surprised by the quick turn of events.
“I’ve got to brush my teeth.”
“All right.”
I accompany him upstairs. His room is a mess. Tapes, clothes, books, papers are scattered everywhere. There are posters and hand-drawn signs, all with images of death. I watch him closely to see that he doesn’t pull a knife out of his drawers. He finds the Walkman and a few tapes.
When he is ready to go, his parents say, “We love you.”
“I never want to see you again,” he says, then turns and starts toward the door. Toniah and I walk on either side of him. Toniah motions for me to grab his arm, but I don’t. I don’t want him to feel he is being taken by force. I let him feel my presence, but don’t hold his arm. I wonder if he tries to run whether I will be able to catch him. He doesn’t try to bolt. I have him sit on the bench. He has his tape on full blast.
“Is that Megadeth?” I ask.
He looks at me blankly, then turns the volume down.
“Is that Megadeth?”
“No, just Death,” he says.
“You like metal.”
“Yeah,” he says.
We talk about music. He doesn’t care for Guns N’ Roses, but when I mention Alice Cooper, he likes that. He also likes Ozzy Osbourne. I tell him the story about Alice Cooper biting the head off a chicken, and he is very interested. He says he’s going to get an electric guitar after Christmas and his mom is going to pay for him to have lessons.
“You know, I know you’re pissed at your mom now.”
“She’s a lying bitch,” he says. “I never tried to hurt myself.”
“Well, sometimes people can see the same thing differently.”
“She wanted me to go to a private school, and I didn’t want to so I carved an X on my arm.”
“You painted an X on your arm or you carved it?”
“Carved it with a knife,” he says.
“Well, I can see how she would think you were trying to hurt yourself. That’s a reasonable—may not be right—but it’s a reasonable interpretation.”
“I just didn’t want to go.”
“I didn’t get along with my mom either. She didn’t understand me and was also doing stuff I didn’t like. She died when I was thirty. We never made it right. Adults don’t always know what they’re doing. Sometimes they need people to talk to, too.”
He is listening to me.
“Me, I’d love to be a rock ‘n’ roll star. I’d like to be like Eric Clapton, but I’m not musical. I mean, I love to sing around the house, I sing all the time, but I’m not good. I still like to do it. I’ve got one of those CD players that holds twenty-four CDs, and you can hit random and it’ll play just like a jukebox.”
“Cool,” he says.
“I just come home and put it on, and have a beer and sing along. It gives me strength. I do this three days a week, then I write on the others—that’s what I really like to do. But I’m thirty-seven years old. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing with myself, but I have this dream, and I don’t want to give it up.”
“You’re, like, an author?”
“It’s what I try to be.”
“Cool. What are you writing about?”
“This—being a paramedic—and I like to write fiction, stories about real people. I guess I hope I’ll write a bestseller, and I’ll make a million dollars and sell it to the movies, and I’ll get a big house with a swimming pool on the ocean, and sit around and smoke cigars. I tell you what—I make a movie, I’ll give you a role. You can be a rock guitarist.”
“Yeah.”
We’re almost at the hospital now. “Hey,” I say, “I forgot to take your blood pressure. Can you take your coat off for me?”
“Sure.” He undoes his coat, and I take the pressure.
“How is it?” he asks. “Am I okay?”
“One twenty over eighty. Perfect. It’s good. You’ll live to be a hundred years old.”
We go into the ER. He’s got his headphones back on—the volume is so loud I can hear the pounding guitars. The triage nurse comes over and I lead her away from him.
“Get away from the music,” she says.
I explain that he’s a sweet kid and that his best friend killed himself and his mom is worried he might hurt himself. I give her the number of the doctor at the institute who will come down to see him and get him transferred to the IOL. I say there is a lot of tension between him and his mom right now.
“Poor thing,” she says.
The nurses all take to him instantly. They put him in a room with an attendant watching the door. A nurse goes in and talks to him, and they seem to be getting along great. I look in the waiting room and see his mom. She is on the other side of the divide, now, helplessly looking into the ER, barred by the locked gate.
I think sometimes the reason I haven’t settled down and fathered is because I am worried I could not bear the pain of my child’s hurts. I told my friend Brad once that I thought he was courageous to have four kids. He said it wasn’t courage. Being a parent gives you strength you thought you might not have.
We’re called for a three-week-old who fell, hit his head, and is not breathing.
We pull to the curb behind the fire truck. I see a mother emerge from the front door carrying a small infant, surrounded by large firemen in full turnout gear. “The baby was breathing when we got here,” a fireman tells me. “He’s got a bump on his head.”
I look at the baby, a tiny baby, who looks fresh out of the womb. I see the hematoma on the back of the skull. The baby is so tiny, I am concerned, but the baby is crying and that is a good sign. I take the baby from the mother’s arms and examine it as I carry it to the back of the ambulance. The mother climbs in next to me on the ambulance bench. I lay the baby on the stretcher and the mother instantly reaches to pick it up.
“No, no,” I say. “It must be on the stretcher.” I do
not want any sudden stops to send the baby flying. It is safe on the stretcher.
The baby lies there crying. I listen to its heartbeat with my stethoscope. The crying makes it hard for me to hear.
The mother reaches for the baby again, and I say no. “Es bueno,” I say, “that the niño is crying. Bueno.”
I pick up my clipboard and start asking for information. We are already en route to Hartford Hospital.
The mother is crying and can barely tell me the baby’s name and birth date. She tries to pick the baby up again, and again I say no.
A wild look comes in her eye. She reaches under her shirt, removes a huge bare breast and throws herself on top of the tiny infant, whose lips and tiny hands go right to the stiff nipple. He is instantly quiet and peaceful, lying there sucking under his mother who is now prone above him on the stretcher.
I look to the front, but Glenn is oblivious to the scene in back. He is just driving along listening to country music. I look back at this scene, at the tiny baby lying under this huge breast, and the mother lying awkwardly on top of him, doing the only thing she knows will make him stop crying. In EMT school they teach us not to let patients have anything by mouth. I say nothing, speechless.
A Couple
It’s the end of our shift, and we’re sent to cover Newington. Normally I hate being out in Newington, but I’m bone tired, my back is killing me, and I’ve sweated clear through my uniform. There are white streaks on my black T-shirt showing through from all the salt that has come out of me. We’ve done eleven transports since seven this morning and two refusals, so being out in Newington for the last hour of our shift is something of a relief. Newington is a sleepy town with a young population that helps keep its call volume low. We are under contract to keep a paramedic rig in town twenty-four hours a day with a five-minute response time whenever called. As soon as we respond to a call, the company has to send another medic unit out to cover. The crew covering can be out there seven or eight hours without a call and nothing to do but drive around town or sit in the park and watch the young mothers take their kids to swim practice, or soccer practice, or baseball or football practice.
We’re out there ten minutes when we get called for an MVA at Cedar and Russell. We pull up, and it looks like a BS call, like a few refusals and we’ll be able to clear. It’s a fender bender. One car hit another from behind, and that car clipped another car, but the damage looks minor. A cop waves me over to the middle car. There is a smashed bumper, but no damage to the windshield. I see an elderly couple in their seats with shoulder belts still on. I go to the passenger side, where the woman is sitting. “How are you?” I say.
“My chest hurts,” she says, “right here where my belt is, but I’m worried about my husband. He has high blood pressure and has had heart surgery.”
“How are you, sir?” I ask.
“I’m okay,” he says. “My wife’s chest hurts.”
“He’s got high blood pressure, and he had heart surgery,” she says. “I’m all right, really. Will you check him out?”
She is seventy-five and he is eighty-three. We get them both boarded and collared and into the back of the ambulance. I kneel between them, taking blood pressures and doing a full physical assessment. I put them both on oxygen by cannula as a precaution. I put the husband on the heart monitor. He has a normal sinus rhythm. His blood pressure is high at 230/120, but he tells me he always runs high. His wife’s chest hurts right along the path of the belt, but I am not overly concerned about her. There is no crepitus or bruising. She has pain only if I press down hard. We go to the hospital without lights and sirens. The wife on the bench, the husband on the stretcher, they hold hands. I get their full medical histories. He has prostate cancer, I learn. I run a six-inch strip from the heart monitor and give it to the wife. “This is your husband’s heart,” I say to her. “From watching the two of you, I know that it beats for you.”
He squeezes her hand.
At the hospital I try to have them put in the same room, but because of the husband’s heart history and high blood pressure, they put him in Room 11, where he can be put on a monitor, while she goes into Room 20 on the other hallway.
After I have written my run reports, I stop by to see them. I tell the wife her husband is doing well, and hopefully, they will be back together soon.
“I am so worried,” she says. “It is his birthday today. Eighty-three years old. I wanted to take him to a lobster feast. He insisted on driving. He couldn’t stop in time. He doesn’t have the reactions anymore. He won’t be able to drive after this. They will take that away from him. He is dying of cancer. The poor man is dying.”
He is still on the board, hooked up to the monitor when I check on him. I tell him his wife is doing well and sends her love.
“Is she all right?” he asks.
“Yes, she is doing well.”
“It was my fault,” he says. He starts to cry. “I hurt her. I didn’t mean to hurt her. It was my fault.”
He brings his hands to his face and weeps. His entire body shakes. “Don’t worry,” I say. “She is okay. She will be all right. Don’t worry.”
“It was my fault. Who will take care of her?”
“She will be all right.” I hold his hand.
“I love her,” he says.
He cries.
It is dark when I get home. I live in a large apartment complex, a restored carpet factory that rents out to young professionals. It is a little more than I can afford, but I like living there. The ceilings are high, the outside walls are brick, and there is a health club on the premises. I get out of my car and walk to the door of my building, carrying my briefcase. It is the same briefcase that once held briefing papers for senatorial debates and draft copies of the governor’s state-of-the-state speech. It is now old and beaten, ripped in the corners. It holds my protocol book, my clipboard, copies of my run forms, cough medicine, deodorant, a paperback novel, my stethoscope, and assorted items. I nod to my neighbors in business suits and dresses, whose names I do not know. “Evening, how are you?” I check my mailbox. Grocery-store flyers and bulk-mail credit-card applications.
In my apartment, I set my briefcase down on the kitchen counter. I take some cold potatoes and chicken out of the refrigerator. I open a beer and turn on the stereo. James Carr, an old forgotten soul great, sings “To Love Somebody.”
I stand by the window and look out through the blinds at the gray-black sky to the north. I wish my apartment were not so empty.
CHANGES
Changes
My friend Brad is going to be on the “CBS Nightly News” with Dan Rather in their Eye on America spotlight. Several months after he lost his bid for Congress, he was appointed sheriff of Middlesex County. Every year on opening day at Fenway Park in Boston, we go to the Cask and Flagon on Landsdowne Street for a few postgame beers. I am unable to attend this year because the Monday home opener is rained out and I am working on the ambulance on Tuesday. Brad goes with another good friend of ours from our younger years. “Hey, everybody,” the friend declares, raising a beer in toast, “there’s a new sheriff in town!”
Comparing my life with Brad’s, I feel like Falstaff in the Henry IV stories in which Prince Hal goes on to become king. I think of all the beers Brad and I drank together, the highways traveled and women chased. Now Brad is a father of four, a church vestryman, and a pillar of his community. Though I have had long relationships with women, I am still single, driving a car with over 120,000 miles on it, and a source of concern to my father as to why I have not settled into a stable job with a retirement plan.
It seems there is a serious overcrowding problem in the Middlesex County prison, and Brad has been ordered by the court to release prisoners, but he is refusing. He says he has let out everyone he can, but the remaining prisoners are not candidates for release. He has appeared on the front page of the Boston Herald declaring, “I’d rather go to jail then let them out.” Both the Herald and the Globe have written positive
editorials. There is a clear irony in the sheriff having to go to jail for refusing to let out the prisoners the court ordered him to jail. This is the story CBS News is covering.
We are at the Farmington Avenue office at six-twenty, waiting for the news to come on, when we get a call for a drunk. We drop the drunk off at Saint Francis and clear by ten of seven. I’m hoping to catch the show when we get another call—shooting on Brooke Street. We respond on a one. They update us—shooting to the neck. A crowd is gathered outside the apartment building. They point inside the door. As I go through the narrow corridors and into the apartment, cluttered with furniture, I am saying to myself, please don’t be lying on the ground, dead in a pool of blood. It will be a nightmare getting the person out of here. In the back room, I see a woman standing with a red towel around her neck. She is alert and oriented. I ask her to remove the towel. She has bullet holes on both sides of the front of her neck—the cop wants to ask her questions. “At the hospital,” I say. “She’s coming with me.” I walk her quickly out of the apartment and get her into the back of the ambulance. I put in an IV as we go, lights and sirens, to the hospital. She asks me if she can have a cigarette.
“No,” I say, “you’re lucky you’re not dead.”
“Why can’t I smoke?”
I am tempted to say, “Because you will be blowing smoke rings out of your neck.”
They have the full trauma team awaiting her. Dr. Morgan says he’s never seen anything like it. A through-and-through bullet wound to the neck without taking out her trachea or esophagus.
I look at my watch. It is 7:01. The show is over. I think if I had gone and worked for Brad I would be sitting in his living room now with his kids all around, celebrating his being on TV. I’d be drinking a beer, my tie loosened, and fielding calls from reporters for him, spinning the story like I did in the campaign. Instead I’m tired, beat, blood on my shirt. Still, I feel good about myself. I like my job and I’m getting better at it.
On Guard
Paramedic Page 20