It was 02:32 when Rescue 7 (the ambulance stationed in the thick of the city) responded to the call. The men rolled from their mattresses and pulled on their uniforms. Within a few minutes they transformed from sleeping figures to medical professionals, ready for the call.
The operator told them as much as she knew - unconscious male patient, twenty seven, at 37b third street. Police en route.
“Could be drugs,” Mike said to Jethro.
“Could be someone partied too hard,” Jethro countered as he began sorting through the calls he’d taken with similar patients, trying to determine which skills he might use. He knew he’d be taking point on this call, he was only a year out of paramedic school, but Mike was still only an EMT - the lowest rung of the medical ladder. Mike wasn’t even permitted to administer most of the drugs needed for a regular call, let alone an unconscious patient at 2 in the morning.
When they arrived at the address, Jethro grabbed his bag of supplies and lead the climb up the dilapidated porch stairway, avoiding the broken and rotting steps. They’d beat the police, which was unusual, but not completely uncommon. Jethro raised his gloved hand and rapped on the door. A frantic woman, who was probably twenty-eight but looked forty, lead the two men up yet another stairway to the bedroom.
“What was he doing before he passed out?” Jethro asked the girl, who was strangely serene. Unnaturally calm, actually, which set off alarm bells in Jethro’s head.
“Nothing, just watching some tv. He was, like, fine until I looked over and he’d passed out.”
A likely story.
The woman pushed open a door without a knob and Jethro’s eyes found a man lying on the ground. It was obvious within a moment - Mike had been right. Drugs. No pains had been taken to hide the needle that had done the damage, it was lying next to the man, amidst odds and ends that nearly covered the floor - from dirty laundry to half-full takeout boxes.
At what point do you stop smelling this? At what point do you stop noticing what your life has become? The thoughts crossed Jethro’s mind in a moment as he began his work.
After a preliminary survey of the patient, the overdose was confirmed and Jethro was able to tell that though unconscious, the patient was breathing and his pulse was alright. He was stable, for now.
“Narcan?” Mike asked.
That was the question, and it played in Jethro’s mind. To administer the Narcan (the antidote for the overdose, which would wake the patient) right away, or to wait until they were loaded in the ambulance and a few minutes away from the hospital. He had to make a decision. The choice seems simple - you wake the patient up of course, and solve the problem. But patients don’t always wake up feeling civil. The Narcan is similar in effect to a shot of adrenaline and often the patient wakes up angry and confused and in pain.
Still, so much could happen between that moment, kneeling beside the patient in his grungy room, and the time it would take to load him. If he coded, well, that wasn’t going to happen. He had to make a decision.
Where was the cop? He should’ve shown up by now, Jethro thought to himself.
“Jethro?” Mike was trying to keep the deer-in-the-headlights look from his eyes, and though it had only been five minutes since they first walked through the door, Jethro knew he had to make a decision.
Family help:
ReplyDeleteWhen I was on fire writing short stories, I 'stole' a lot of events, characters, situations, and plot ideas from my mother's quite freewheeling life. She loved reading my stuff, especially in print the several times I sold one the pieces where I'd used her biographical odds and ends. She called me her chronicler, though in point of fact, everything I wrote was fiction. Come to find out, she preferred my imaginings to her sometimes rather sordid realities, so we were both happy.
It’s funny, the relationship we writers have to the things around us and how little details and whole scenarios are woven into our pieces and changed and kept the same.
ReplyDeleteIt’s also funny how the people in our lives are always determined to find themselves in our pieces! How to explain that maybe they’re there and then again they’re really not?
But I think you’ll find it humorous when you read the part 2 to this little piece of fiction. I’ve found that I’m a chronicler of my fears - I don’t find it difficult to imagine and breathe life into fiction when it’s acting out the situations that my worst-case-scenario mind thinks of all the time.
Also, this is a thread that I think I’ll be including in the book I write next (set in the ED, of course). I figure whenever I get an idea now, while I’m still editing Sparks, I’ll stick it here so it doesn’t get lost.
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