16
The worst crisis intervention calls are for suicides; even worse are the failed suicides—people who drink drain cleaner or overdose on pills or shoot half their heads off. Sometimes we catch them before they die; sometimes it is too late.
Once I was called to a house late at night. The estranged husband of a woman had been calling his wife’s home for two days and couldn’t get an answer. He finally called the police. The police called us. When we got there the woman was five days dead. She had started to decompose. She looked like she was made of melting saddle leather. The house was a mess, the physical embodiment of depression. On the mirror in the bathroom in red lipstick she had drawn a happy face, and underneath scrawled
“See you on
the other side.”
It made me sick to my stomach.
It is not just the dead whose tableaux stick in my mind. Sick people’s rooms and the smell of them seep into my clothes and burn an image into my brain.
The world of the very sick is a deceptively cozy one, sort of like a nightmare nursery for grown-ups. Sick people wear robes that are pink and fuzzy, greeting cards and flowers line their dresser tops. But instead of the nursery smell of a freshly washed baby there is the smell of used bedsheets, of medicines, of worry.
When we arrive at the house of a sick person we are often led to the bedroom. If the patient is very sick, possibly dying of cancer or maybe ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), they are often in a hospital bed placed in the living room, the centerpiece around which all life revolves.
Sickrooms tend to be extremely messy or extremely neat. The messy ones boast piles of magazines, books strewn about, volcanoes of pill bottles, sick-person things like spoons coated with sticky medicines and old pajamas piled on a chair. But the tidy rooms are no less unsettling. Many houses have the sick person in bed in a blank room with a religious icon above the bed and maybe a clock radio for comfort. It is hard to imagine how boring it would be to spend any time in this room, blank and lonely as a grave.
When we go to a sick person’s house we ask to see all the medicines a person is taking. People either have medicines strewn everywhere or they have no idea what or where their medicines are.
On one extreme are the caretakers who not only have all their ward’s medicine bottles lined up like little soldiers in a row, but have computer printouts on hand of exactly what and how much of it the sick person is taking.
The other extreme are the people who tell you, “I take a pink pill for my heart and a green one for my liver.” They have no idea what the medicines are, just that they came from a doctor and are expensive.
In a third category are people whose medicines are homegrown. You would be surprised in these days of alternative health practices what weird stuff people ingest in an effort to cure themselves.
I am toned out to a pretty pink house with white shutters and a white picket fence in Redding. Bernice has already beaten me to the call. This time is different than others because the ambulance has already left with the patient, leaving Bernice behind.
“In here,” Bernice calls for me when she hears my footsteps, and motions to a bedroom off a narrow hallway. There is a strange stench coming from the room. Not the now familiar smell of a sick person, or soiled underpants or layers of room deodorizer covering pee-soaked bedding that we so often gag on. This is a musty new odor, like sweat socks or damp old shoes. My eye is drawn to the top of her bureau, where there are Mason jars filled with brown fungus and what looks like malevolent toadstools. Hideous-looking warty growths flourish in the mini terrariums. In a pan is a huge fungus, like the top of a mushroom, soaking in water.
I look around the bedroom. I go into the adjoining bathroom. Unlike its prim exterior, the inside is messy, with magazines strewn about. I look at the selection of magazines. They are all related to herbal remedies and natural foods. I have heard of
Prevention,
but the other ones are obscure and new to me.
“What the hell happened?” I ask.
“As best as I can figure, the lady who lives here was trying to treat herself for something and she has been taking herbs and things. She obviously took too much or mixed the wrong things together. I don’t know what she took; she was comatose when we got here.” Bernice points to the big fungus in the pool of water. “See if you can find a container and let’s bring it to the hospital.”
I go into the kitchen and look for a Tupperware container, but I can’t find one. I can’t find any containers or plastic bags. There are ecological brown paper bags, but I can’t use those. I find a cooking fork, big, with two long prongs. I go back into the bedroom and stand above the huge brown floating fungus. Is it alive? I am scared of it. Am I imagining it is pulsating? I can’t stand the thought of touching it, much less imagine eating this nasty-looking wad of goo.
There is a small plastic wastebasket in the corner of the room. I pick it up and shake out the Kleenex and whatever else is in it. I stick the fork through the brown glob. It breaks in half; I see its underside has gills. It appears to be a giant mushroom. I stab at it again. I think of the movie
Alien,
where the scary thing flies in the guy’s face and slithers down his throat. Instinctively I use my other hand to cover my lower face. I finally get a good hunk of the thing on the fork and slide it into the wastebasket.
“So you think it was an overdose of this?” I ask Bernice, pointing to the brown thing sloshing about in the wastebasket. I am terrified it is going to fall over. I steady it with my hand.
“That, or she combined it with something,” Bernice says.
We carefully place the wastebasket in the back of my car, open all the windows, and drive to the hospital.
EMTs love arriving at the ER with something unusual. If you bring in someone who has a stomachache or has twisted his ankle you will probably not be acknowledged with eye contact by the staff. They will take your paperwork and get the stats from you and that’s it, but the stench of what we have brought in the wastebasket already has their attention. The stink is slowly filling the ER, overpowering the medicinal smell of the hospital.
“We think the patient that arrived here about half an hour ago in the Georgetown ambulance ate some of this,” Bernice tells the nurse.
The nurse looks into the pail and looks up at me. “You’re kidding,” she says. I shrug. I can tell she is impressed.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to the health food store again,” Bernice says as we walk outside the hospital to my car. Before we climb inside Bernice takes out a bottle of cologne from her purse and gives a few blasts inside my car. The stink seems to be growing exponentially. I think of the
Seinfeld
episode where Jerry’s car takes on a bad smell, which cannot be removed, from a stinky valet parking guy. When I get home I pull out some “miracle” product that I bought from a late-night TV ad. I mix up a bucket of it and scrub the inside of my car with a stiff brush. In the morning it smells normal.
17
The first day I attended the class that would turn me into an EMT, each student was called upon to stand up, face the class, and tell all assembled why he or she had chosen to take the training. I remember saying that when a bad situation happened at home or on a highway, I felt like I wanted to help but didn’t know what to do. I was not alone. Many people in the class expressed the same sentiments about being unable to cope effectively with emergencies, and wanting that to change. Like me, they wanted to be master of the sudden crisis, to control chaos.
I think back to the moment on the plane that was stuck on the runway and how I felt utterly powerless. All I could do was wait, like a dog with its head cocked waiting for the master’s voice, for someone in the control tower to give the go-ahead to the mystery pilot behind the captain’s closed cockpit. Then and only then would the plane move. Only then would I be all right.
I fought hard against the very concept of being powerless. Michael was so much more evolved than I was in this regard. An alcoholic, he had stopped drinking and had been sober for two years. He talked to me about his AA group and the twelve steps. Number one was admitting you were powerless. I hated the first step and could see no purpose in it. Fine if he wanted to relinquish trying to be the boss of things, but I, for one, was sure that if I tried hard enough I could even get planes to move on the runway.
Michael’s hobby is riding horses, a high-risk endeavor. Many times, especially at night, I imagined him thrown off his horse, lying alone, somewhere in the deep woods, and no one to help him. “You must carry a cell phone,” I urged. “You must carry an all-purpose knife to cut the reins or your clothes if you need to. . . . Wear a helmet,” I implored. Occasionally if Michael came home with stories of his horse acting wild, my eyes would grow to saucer size and I would command, “Sell the horse. It is the only sensible thing to do.” Of course, the more I complained, the faster Michael rode his horse, just as every time I explained in graphic detail the hideous things that happen in a car wreck, the faster he drove. Michael did as he pleased. I was powerless over his behavior. My trying to control him made him more reckless. Not that my suggestions were bad, but I made it clear that I felt I was in charge of keeping Michael safe and alive. Being an EMT made me even more of a control freak. I had an advanced CPR card in my wallet that declared me a “professional rescuer,” and I believed my own press.
It took a personal crisis to make me realize that even with the best of help, bad things can happen to good people. We are all powerless.
The man who owned the barn where we boarded our horses was a father figure to us. Michael and I adored John, sixty-nine years old and still working twelve-hour days, shoeing horses and hauling hay. He was our fount of knowledge about horses and also about people. As a horse trader, he could psyche out a weakling or a phony right away. He was a rare thing, a real Connecticut cowboy. He dressed like a working cowboy, in Wranglers, boots, and Carhartt barn coats, and had ridden the East Coast rodeo circuit. He was rumored to be a good trick rider in his younger days.
John was tireless, although he seemed to live on a diet of Johnny Walker Black Label scotch, coffee from the nearby 7-Eleven, and Copenhagen chewing tobacco. He must have eaten, but none of us ever caught him in the act. He felt so much like family that Michael and I used to save up our frequent flyer miles and once a year we would take him with us out West, to see the real ranges and prairies that he had only heard of or seen in movies. More horse than man, he amused us with his equine-eyed travelogues. He hated the bare desert of southern Arizona: “Not a tree to stand under or any water,” he said. He didn’t like the trails of rocky Oregon: “Lose too many horseshoes,” he grumbled. But he was enraptured with the bounty of hay he saw being harvested in Washington State. “Now that’s pretty,” he said with a sigh.
Then one night when he was at his horse barn, cleaning out stalls at the end of a long workday, his brain hemorrhaged and he lay at the bottom of a flight of stairs for hours bleeding intercranially until someone found him.
The EMTs were called, not Georgetown’s but those of the town where he lived, and they came to get him. They did a good job because they got him to the hospital alive and in time for the neurosurgeons to operate on him and stop the bleeding in his brain.
The day after this incident Michael and I went to the hospital to see John. His head was shaved and bandaged, his arms still tanned from the late-summer sun, his muscles still bulging from a lifetime of hard physical labor.
It took two weeks for John to come out of his coma, and then the damage was assessed. His left side is paralyzed, he needs to be fed with a tube, his memory is gone. He doesn’t remember he likes Copenhagen chewing tobacco or the rodeo, or pretty blondes with long legs, or balanced ride saddles from Colorado. “Saved” by the quick-thinking EMTs in the ambulance, he had gone from the master of his horsey domain to a cripple who will never be able to rise up on his own two legs from a nursing home bed.
I wear my EMT jacket to the hospital to visit him the day after the stroke. It is protection for me, a security blanket that gives me the illusion that I have some control over this bleak situation. I am, after all, “Ambulance Girl”—invincible, like Wonder Woman in a flowing cape and tights. Of all the people on the planet, John is the last one who should have wound up as a lifelong invalid. Of course, there is nothing I can do but stand by the bedside and stroke his callused hand.
Months pass. John lies being tube fed in a hospital bed. His arms and legs atrophy and his once tan body turns a sickly shade of white. He has open bedsores and a sour smell comes from his mouth and his adult diaper. He is too messed up and weak to work the TV remote control.
After John’s stroke I am thrown back into a depression and a crisis. To my dismay I no longer want to go on EMT calls. I no longer feel I am helping people to live, but rather I am intervening and not allowing them to die when it is their time. I am sure that the EMTs who came to John’s rescue did the best job they could and went home feeling that they had another “save” under their belts. But I saw what was left of him after they turned the tables on his death. I prayed I would never leave anyone in that terrible state between death and life.
After John’s stroke I am so deeply spooked that I don’t share my feelings with Bernice or anyone else. When the tone goes off I ignore it, make a hundred excuses for why I can’t go. I grow lonely and despondent, sitting once again at home in the dreaded blue bathrobe. I occupy myself by wasting lots of time, watching TV and playing around on the computer. I become an eBay geek, staying up all night logging on to auctions and trawling my favorite categories for hidden treasures that I don’t need and can’t afford. I go to the local discount beauty store and spend a small fortune on all sorts of facial masques and hair treatments, so when the tone goes off I am well greased and wearing a heating cap, or have drying blue clay on my face. Obviously I can’t leave the house this way.
Personally things are going south fast, too. EMT, which started out as a hobby, has changed my life drastically. It has pulled me up out of a midlife funk and cast me back into a vibrant world. Now, because of what happened to John, I don’t trust the magic anymore. I haunt the familiar shadows of despair. It is August and Tom Knox and his family are going on vacation. “Have a shitty time,” I say as a parting farewell. He gives me the “we will have a lot to talk about in September” look as I push out the door.
August rolls into September. John is now in a nursing home. Someone has a picture of his stallion taped up above his bed. He was the only person who could ride this wild horse, and now he can’t even stand up. “That’s his horse,” I tell one of the attendants who is cleaning him up. They could not care less. What he was before being here is of no interest to them.
Tom Knox ups my antidepressant medication. It makes me feel marginally better, although l am plagued again by psychosomatic problems. Thinking of John, my whole left side goes numb and stays that way for a week. I am scared but won’t see a doctor. Michael is as depressed about John as I am. He doesn’t want to talk about the hopelessness of John’s condition. He gets antsy when I bring it up. He doesn’t know the answer to my endless “what will happen to him?” questions. Michael’s immune system is taxed from the stress and worry and when he gets a terrible flu he moves into the guest bedroom to sleep. When his flu gets better he continues to sleep there. “I can’t stand that radio of yours going off in the middle of the night,” he says. Things grow tense between us. I try to lure him back to the bedroom with promises of the radio being so low he can’t hear it, and how I will put crisp sheets on the beds every other day. Nothing works. I go to bed alone in the big master bedroom.
Like Beaver Cleaver, Michael has filled the guest room with guy stuff: gun magazines, horse books, and sneakers, and it is apparent to me that he is planning to stay there for quite a while.
Michael has supported my becoming an EMT and now it is backfiring. He resents the intrusion of other people’s emergencies into our private life and I am not enjoying the calls anymore. I am burning out, just as I was told I would, but of course I never believed it would happen to me.
I have fallen into the habit of bitching about everything and everyone. I am no longer cheerful. When I do go to calls I am angry with patients who are not deathly ill. “Why can’t they just get a friend to drive them to the hospital?” I gripe, and I equally dislike the ones that are truly ill because they stress me out and remind me of John lying in his hospital bed.
When you expect the worst of people, you get it. In the next few months I shuttle between home and Tom Knox’s office spewing my dissatisfaction. When the tone goes off I am confronted with one nasty situation after another.
A woman motorcyclist crashes her bike at the intersection in Georgetown. Her skull is cracked and she is a high-priority transport. I work on her like crazy, keeping her calm as she comes in and out of consciousness in the back of the ambulance. I know her and her husband from around town. The day after her accident I see him shopping at the grocery store and ask him how she is. He appears grateful, but says, “The wife and I were just delighted that you ambulance people didn’t steal her watch.” I am speechless at his insensitivity.
I get the dreaded Mrs. Gernig in the back of the rig. At eighty years old, Mrs. Gernig is a sneaky drunk and a nasty one at that. She would drink and then fall off her chair and push the pendant around her neck to alert 911. There is nothing wrong with her but she still wants to be transported to the hospital. She is what EMTs call a “frequent flyer.” She wants a fuss made over her and wants the ride to the hospital. Mrs. Gernig stinks of liquor so badly that if there were an open flame in the ambulance, she and I would combust.
In gathering information for the run form I try to be discreet and ask her if she has had “a cocktail,” for which she reams me out royally, making me feel that I will be sued for defamation of character if I don’t immediately shut up.
Bad karma draws bad karma. I miss all the interesting calls. Tom Knox has made me promise I will not hide out at home. The question is why I bother to go at all. I miss the calls for rosy-cheeked babies who need to have their little button noses wiped, and the grateful handsome folks who send checks to the firehouse after we transport them. Instead I get the eighty-five-year-old man who has been sitting on his couch naked watching TV when he accidentally makes a BM and then moves to another chair, where he sits on his sleeping cat and calls 911. I spend the better part of the next hour picking cat hair out of this old man’s ass crack. I get the calls for the demented spinster sisters who live in a ramshackle house by the railroad tracks with their books and high-falutin’ college degrees framed on the wall. They speak in cultured accents as they recline on sofas reeking of their urine.
Michael is still holed up in the guest room. Nothing is going right; even my uniform is driving me crazy. The jumpsuit that I wear to night calls has shrunk in the dryer to the point that when I sit down the pants end about twelve inches above my ankles. I look like I am wearing capri pants as I trudge into the hospital pushing someone on a stretcher.
I start to develop a tremor. I hope it is nerves but I fear it is Parkinson’s disease. I talk to Tom Knox, who sends me to a neurologist. He assures me that it is a benign condition. However, I am so trembly that when I wrap the blood pressure cuff around a patient’s arm, my hands shake so badly that the cuff falls off. When I am stressed, which is now all the time, I look like I am having a palsied fit. If I were a patient I would not allow me to touch me.
“There are three ways to treat the tremor,” Tom says. “First, cut out caffeine.” As he talks, I look at the row of take-out cups of Starbuck’s coffee on his desk. Tom is legendary at the Starbuck’s near his office because he drinks his coffee with six shots of espresso. I drink one measly cup of coffee a day and am not about to give it up. “Or you can take a beta-blocker,” Tom says. “It will stop the tremors and might lessen your adrenaline rush in situations where you feel panicky.”
I like the sound of this and I leave the office with a prescription. Beta-blockers are used primarily for people with high blood pressure. They regulate the heartbeat and keep blood pressure from shooting up. But they are also used for stagefright and other conditions where nerves take over and render the person unable to cope. I am wildly excited about finding a drug that will keep me from shaking and also cure my panic attacks. I stop at the drugstore and fill the prescription on the way home, so eager to try it I pop a pill on the spot.
As soon as I get home the ambulance tone goes off. I jump in the car and drive fast to the house of Stephen Demeter, one of Georgetown’s most highly regarded citizens. Mr. and Mrs. Demeter are in their eighties, both playwrights and part of the original small group of creative people who found their way to rural Connecticut fifty years ago. They are town legends, they live on a gracious farm, their house overflows with art, and sunshine streams in their studio windows.