I came into work to find the crews in an uproar. Instead of checking out their ambulances, they were clustered in the office.
“The paper is screwing us again,” Andrew Melnick said.
Victor handed me a copy of the newspaper. There it was on the front page -- “Ambulances Fail To Meet Response Standard.”
“There’s more inside,” he said.
I opened the paper up. The stories covered two full pages along with photos and sidebars. “Councilman Questions Response Times,” “Dial 911 and Pray,” and “Not 1st Time Capitol Investigated.” On the editorial page was another “Overhaul EMS System.”
“This is BS,” Victor said. “I’d like to see them do our job.”
Melnick read aloud, “When Rosalind Fuentes came home to find her mother passed out on the kitchen floor, she dialed 911. She had little idea that it would take fifteen minutes for an ambulance to arrive. She blames Capitol Ambulance for her mother’s death. ‘If they had gotten there quickly, she might be alive today,’ a grieving Fuentes said in the Vine Street apartment she has shared with her infirm mother for the last eighteen years.”
“Wait,” Audrey Davis said, “Fuentes on Vine Street, I did that call. First they send another car to Zion Street. No one there. They call back. They misheard. It’s Vine Street. So because we’re north, they send us. The lady had rigor mortis. We called her right there. She was stiff. She’d been dead for hours.”
“No, I think Capitol Ambulance killed her,” Melnick said.
“Yeah, if we did, you must have been on duty,” Nestor said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll never reach your kill total. Listen to this.” He read, “National EMS expert Gerald Devine said the standard for an ambulance response is five to eight minutes, a standard that a study done by this paper shows is violated continually in the city of Hartford, where ambulance response times often exceed ten minutes.”
“He’s probably never even been in an ambulance,” Audrey said. “Response time is BS anyway. You get to the call in three minutes. It takes another ten to get someone to let you in the outside door because the security system’s busted, then climb the stairs because the elevator’s broken, walk down the hallways and get someone to come to their own apartment door because their music is playing so loud. Then the person who answers the door doesn’t even know that one of the twenty people living in the apartment called for an ambulance. ‘Oh, it’s Tyrecia. She got a stomach ache.’”
“Councilman Perry Santiago asked for a full scale investigation into ambulance response times in Hartford and a review of the city’s current agreement with Capitol Ambulance. ‘Our citizen’s safety is in jeopardy,’ he proclaimed.”
“Santiago? Do they say in there that he’s in bed with Champion, not to mention someone else we all know by the name of Helen Atreus? Of course not. And for another thing if the citizens didn’t use us as a taxi service, we’d be able to get to the real calls on time.”
“Maybe they’ll put some more cars on.”
“Who are they going to put in the more cars?’ Victor said.
“Pay us more money, more people will want to do the job.”
“It’s all bull,” Victor said.
“Yeah,” Audrey said. “Who’s going to do it, if we don’t? Champion? Give me a break. All they know how to do is transfers.”
“The fire department is behind it. They get the 911 contract, its more jobs for them. It’s a national trend.”
“They don’t want to do medical calls. They don’t like vomit and phlegm and shit. We can’t even get them to come out to back us up on codes anymore. All they want is to fight fires. Their union will never go for it.”
“No, some of the young guys there are talking about it. They’re convincing the old guard. Fewer fires means fewer calls which means less money for the fire service.”
“It won’t happen,” Nestor said. “This is just a story to sell papers. It’s their SOP. Find an enemy, slam them all over the front page, and move on to another target. Next week they’ll be slamming the governor or the mayor or the cops or the teacher’s union. The fact is no one really wants to do our jobs and no one wants to pay the money so we can do it right. We’re just easy to walk-on. You all think you’re heroes. But you’re just meat in the seat, you’re just keeping it warm for the next sap to take your place. Nothing more.”
