The hot line rings. Two-thirty in the morning. The dispatcher says, 80 Dorchester. That's all. Just the address. That's all we need to know.
Calvin.
I don't work the nights as much as the other guys, but I know Calvin. We take our time getting up. Take a leak. Walk out to the ambulance. Drive over to 80 Dorchester.
There are the same three cars in the driveway -- not three cars up on cement blocks or sitting rusting on the lawn -- three working cars belonging to family members, who no doubt are just where we were ten minutes before, faces resting against their pillow cases.
Calvin meets us at the front door. He's got his jacket on, and his headphones. We don't even have conversation anymore. We have a trip card all made up with all the info we need.
Name name. Thirty-three years old. Sickle Cell Anemia. State Welfare number.
He walks out slow. He's a tall guy, maybe six-three, on the thin side. He's a touch inebriated from his night out clubbing. I can hear the music coming through his Walkman. With his sunglasses, he reminds me of Eddie Murphy in “48 Hours” where he's singing "Roxanne" oblivious to everyone around him.
One of the medics looked it up and said we have transported him over 180 times. Years ago, we used to take him to the closest city hospital, about quarter mile down the road from the town border. Then we went to the next city hospital, three miles down the road, and then to the hospital in the South end. Now we go almost twenty miles away to the farthest hospital in our service area.
Sickle Cell Anemia is a cruel, ruthless disease. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. During a crisis, the cells obstruct blood flow and it is extremely painful. Most sickle cell patients are on morphine all the time. They develop a dependence that requires more and more morphine to take the pain away.
Calvin is on a solid dose of morphine. At night he sometimes wants just a little more to ease him. Some would say he needs it to dull the pain, others say he just wants to get high. The other hospitals got tired of seeing him all the time so they gradually stopped giving him that little extra, so he's now on his fourth and last hospital.
My partner drives rougher than normal tonight. He's tired from working all day and doesn't care for Calvin.
Calvin takes off his sun glasses and glares at me. "He's driving a little rough."
"The roads are bad," I say.
Calvin doesn't look in any distress. I've emptied out my morphine vials for sickle cell patients before, but I've never seen Calvin in that degree of pain. Maybe he isn't in that great of pain or maybe he just does a good job of hiding it.
I patch to the hospital. The other medic told me when he patches for Calvin, he just says, "CH7." Translated it means, "We're bring you Calvin Homes. We're seven minutes out." The nurses know Calvin, too.
I stare at him on the stretcher, his feet hanging off the end. He's got his shades back on now and he is moving his head from side to side like Stevie Wonder.
One of the other guys wrote a song about Calvin. It went something like: "He's six foot three, he's a big pussy, Calvin Holmes." The medic said he wrote six verses one night.
What upsets the other medic about Calvin is that after a night out on the town, instead of having his friends drop him off at the hospital, Calvin has them drop him off at home, and then Calvin calls us. He just sits on our stretcher. We never do anything for him, but give him a ride. We've talked about refusing to take him to the faraway hospital, but it is hard to change the rules for one, and not for all.
"One of these days, we won't be taking him anymore," the other medic says. "He's not looking too good lately."
And that's true. He's moving slower tonight than the last time I took him in. His skin looks sickly. He's only thirty-three, but sickle cell disease has its way of wearing a person down.
When he dies, someone here will cut his obit out and post it on the bulletin board.
***
Postscript: One morning I walk into work and there it is, tacked right next to the schedule. Rest in Peace, CH.
What is Sickle Cell Anemia?
