“482, Respond to 1640 Main, 2nd Floor for difficulty breathing on a one.”
North on Main Street, the SANDS housing project dominated the vista, a ten story eye-sore, surrounded by several equally ugly three story buildings. Any promise the project once held of a model life for its residents was gone. It was instead a drab graffiti ridden concrete jungle run by drug dealers and gangs. We parked around back behind one of the smaller buildings, next to a panel truck with smashed windows.
“You should see this place on a hot summer evening,” Victor Sanchez said as we got out. “Everyone outside in the heat, drinking their forties, music blaring, dealing drugs.”
We left the stretcher at the base of the outside stairs. I took the oxygen tank. Victor carried the house bag and the heart monitor. Victor was a short bull-chested young man who’d been with the company almost ten years, working his way up from a handicapped van driver to paramedic.
“It’s probably BS,” he said, as we climbed the cement stairwell. “Most calls around here are. You never know. I carry everything.”
On the third floor, a young woman wearing a Chicago Bulls jersey that went down to her knees, answered the door. “You here already? I wasn’t expecting you so soon. Gimme a few minutes to get dressed and for my sister to come over.”
“Is there a child here having difficulty breathing?” Victor asked.
“My boy been stuffed up for two weeks and the medicine the doctor give him yesterday not helping. I want to take him back and show him he still sick.”
As she let us in the apartment, I could see a child sitting on the couch watching Wyle E. Coyote chase the Roadrunner on a big screen TV.
“The paper said you always late,” the woman said, routing in the closet and coming up with a gray pair of sweatpants. “When I called yesterday it took ten minutes. Today I hardly put down the phone and you there beating down my door. All the complaining having an effect, huh?”
“Yeah,” Victor said, “They don’t let us stop for doughnuts anymore.”
“I wouldn’t have minded that. I haven’t had breakfast yet. My sister should be here soon. Let me just put these on and get my shoes.”
“Don’t let us rush you,” Victor said.
I carried the equipment down to the ambulance.
After we’d taken the boy to the hospital, where he and his mom were put out into the crowded waiting room, I stood with Victor in the EMS room and listened to people bitch about how the paper was on everybody about response times. Victor tried to fill me in.
“A couple weeks ago there was another gang shooting at an apartment on Wethersfield Avenue,” he said. “The paper said it took the ambulance twenty minutes to get there. The TV news picked it up and we’ve been getting dissed hard. They had an editorial cartoon that showed a giant turtle with an EMT sitting on it holding the reins. It said Capitol Ambulance on the shell. They had a shot guy crying for help in the middle of the road, and a guy in a black hood already digging his grave.”
“Were we twenty minutes late?”
“No. Maybe ten. The problem was the PD wouldn’t let the crew in. They said the scene wasn’t safe. Of course, when Troy gets there he charges through the police tape. The guy is shot eleven times, and Troy starts working him. Pissed the cops off. Trashed their crime scene and nearly started a riot. The home crowd thinking the cops had let him die.”
“The guy didn’t make it, did he?”
“No, he was shot eleven times. Troy will work anybody that isn’t stiff.”
“I heard about your guy yesterday,” Joel Morris, another medic, said to me. “Doctor Eckstein told me the guy had no face. It was all hamburger. Ben was pissed off, huh?”
“He seemed a little upset.”
“Ben and Troy are always butting heads.”
“I thought there was some history there.”
“Ben thinks younger medics should defer to his experience,” Victor said, “but Troy doesn’t defer to anyone. When Troy was new medic, Ben was in the crew room talking with some of the older medics about the state exam. Medics have to test every two years. Every time it’s the same test. Ben always gets a 98 – the best score in the company. He can’t figure out what two questions he gets wrong. The test has to be fixed. He thinks there are two deliberately wrong questions. The state doesn’t want anyone getting a perfect score and thinking they know everything. Troy takes a piece of paper out of his wallet, goes over to the Xerox machine, runs off five copies and hands them to each of the medics. It’s his test results. 100 in each category. The other medics laugh, but it steams Ben up. To Ben you are a new medic, you don’t say a word till you’ve been there two years. You have to prove yourself. Troy was cocky the day his mother popped him out.
“The real rivalry between Troy and Ben started the day Sidney coded,” joel said. “Sidney Seuss -- he’s the guy in the portrait in the front office. He founded the place. A real old time ambulance man. He’d just finished his dialysis treatment – he had his own machine in his office - when he crumpled to the ground. His secretary screams. When Ben gets there, he sees Sidney lying on the carpet. He’s blue. No breathing, no pulse. Ben rips Sidney’s shirt open, puts the paddles on his chest. He’s in v-fib. He shocks him. 200 Joules. No change. Shocks him again. 300 Joules. Nothing. 360. Nothing.
“The secretary starts CPR while Ben goes for the airway. Sidney’s a big broad guy with no neck. A difficult tube. Ben’s looking down into his throat, trying to move his tongue out of the way. He sees the chords for a moment, passes the tube. Puke comes up. He’s in the esophagus.
“That’s when Troy and I come in,” Victor said. “We’d been in the office resupplying. Troy sidesteps the puke, and while Ben tries again, Troy slams an IV in Sidney’s arm. Ben’s still struggling with the tube, Troy says, ‘Let me try.’ He takes the scope from him. Then like that -- ‘I’m in,’ he says. Ben pushes epi and lidocaine into the IV line. They shock him again 360 joules. No change.
“’Calcium,’ Troy says.
“‘Calcium?’ Ben says. We carry it, but it’s not in the routine protocol.
“‘Calcium. His kidneys suck.’
“Ben goes ahead and gives it to him. They shock him again.
“Ben looks at the monitor -- sees a rhythm. You don’t have to feel a pulse. You can just look at his neck and see it pounding.
“Then Sidney opens his eyes and he’s looking right up at Troy. He looks a little confused like maybe he was expecting to see Satan or St. Peter. Instead Troy Johnson is the one grinning at him.
“‘Afternoon, boss,’ Troy says. ‘I see I’m not the only slacker around this place likes to get in a good snooze.’
“Troy was the golden boy after that. Sidney gave Troy his own dedicated ambulance, his own shift whatever hours he wanted to work, and let him pick whatever partner he wanted. Told the dispatchers no transfers for Troy. They have to leave him free for the big bad ones. The Deputy mayor coded. Troy saved him. One of the high-ranking police brass coded. Troy brought him back to life. Head of the chamber of commerce choked on a piece of meat the size of his fist; Troy yanked it out with a pair of McGill’s. The guy was well enough to give the after dinner speech.
“Every save Troy got, Sidney made a show of visiting the patient in the hospital, and bringing a photographer along. Ben wasn’t happy about it -- ,that and the fact every time Sidney saw Ben and Troy together he ribbed Ben about it. ‘Good, I got my bodyguard here to keep my chief paramedic from killing me.’ The truth is we got some good publicity in those days. We were miracle workers. The pride of the city. Paramedics. We were all like Johnny and Roy on that old Emergency show. You could walk tall.”
“Not any more?”
“No, that’s the past. Sidney’s dead. Things are changing for the worse. They don’t get better, we could be out of business. We could all be looking for jobs. So you can understand why no one’s happy.”
***
Note: I will posting a new chapter every other day.
