Troy took a job managing one of his uncle’s hardware stores down by the shore. Without Troy as my partner, the job wasn’t nearly as interesting. While I still worked with Victor three days a week, on the other four they usually put me with new EMTs, which despite the closest car goes policy, usually turned out to be all day transfer duty.
We ferried sick old people, back and forth to dialysis, between radiation treatments, into the ER for debreidment of bedsores and replacement of pulled feeding tubes and Foley catheters. Some people left EMS after burning out from seeing too much trauma -- too many young people dying -- but to many of us the worst was not the young, but the continual contact with the dying and the forgotten. Life decaying before the grave. It was like giving you a picture of what your own future held. It was grim and inescapable.
I saw myself alone in a dim room. A tube stuck out of my stomach hooked up to a bottle of brown thick liquid. A catheter stuck out of my penis hooked to a bag that collected my dark urine. There was a hole cut in my throat. I struggled to breathe through the thick mucus that continually clogged it. Bedsores festered on my back and buttocks. My diaper needed changing. I listened to the endless howling of my roommate as I waited for the reaper to come through my door and take me to another hell.
In the nursing homes, people had no identity. There might be a few cheery photos of children, crayon drawings saying we love grandpa, but we never saw the children there. We rarely saw any visitors at all. We made our way down the halls past the gauntlet of forgotten vacant souls, sitting in their wheels chairs, heads down, mouths open, waiting for their hearts to stop beating. You couldn’t tell who had been football stars, who the captains of industry, who had won all the girls, who had dazzled the boys, who had build skyscrapers, won justice in courtrooms, medals on the field of battle. They were all lumped together now, warehoused in halls that smelled like shit lightly dusted with baby powder. If they were lucky they’d die after the nurse checked them at shift change so when the next shift occurred they’d be to far gone to be saved – saved to continue their life in earth’s version of Hades.
Andrew Melnick and I took a brain-injured patient down to a special rehabilitation facility near the mouth of the Connecticut River. He’d been up at Hartford Hospital for an operation to relieve pressure on his brain. He was twenty-six years old. He’d been in a drunk-driving senior prom accident when he was eighteen and had been unfortunate enough to survive. He’d lost his right leg at the hip, and could not speak. He moved his arms only with great difficulty. They fed him with a tube into his stomach. He had a stoma in his neck from which yellow phlegm had to be suctioned regularly. You could tell he’d once had massive arms, but the tattoo of a Wildcat now appeared grossly misshapen on his right arm, more like a starving kitten with a big head. The facility looked nice from the outside -- it had a spectacular view of the river and Long Island Sound. We brought the man into a room without windows that he shared with three other men in similar condition. The place smelled like baby powder on shit.
Normally we tried to joke in the nursing homes, saying hello to the procession of gray haired ladies sitting in their wheelchairs lining the halls, engaging them in conversation, but this place was like the house of horrors. Everyone was young, crippled in body and mind. It was too close to home. One man sat in his wheel chair, pounding his fist -- the only arm he could move --against the armrest. Though he couldn’t have been thirty, his hair was already thinning. He had dandruff on his shoulders. There was food on his mustache and on his green army jacket. Somewhere down the hall, a man howled. It would stop suddenly, and then start again.
We got our patient into his special wheel chair. While we waited for the nurse to come down and get our report and sign our paperwork acknowledging that we’d successfully delivered him, I read the faded news clippings taped to his wall. “Wheeler Leads Wildcats to Championship, Throws 3 TD Passes.” There was a picture of him in his uniform, being carried on the shoulders of his teammates.
“Another football hero,” I said.
The man grunted and jerked his head. He seemed to motion with his hand.
“I think he wants to show us something,” Andrew said. “Bring him the article.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, he does,” Andrew said. Then to the man, “You were QB? The Seymour Wildcats. That’s good football.”
Andrew took the clipping from me and put it in the man’s shaking hand. We watched as the man slowly brought his other hand over to the clipping, then in one quick jerky movement, he ripped the article, and crumbled it in his hand.
“Hey!” Andrew said, “What’d you do that for?”
The man just looked at him coldly, his arms and hands shaking.
“I didn’t know he was going to rip it up,” Andrew said on the drive back. “How would you figure that?”
I didn’t say anything. I had no answer for him that would soothe him.
