I worked regularly with Andrew Melnick. He was a good kid, who took a lot of ribbing from others, but gave it back as good as he got it. Like a lot of medics he had his cocky side, but he wasn’t above learning from his mistakes.
A small girl with the picture of a rose on her white tee-shirt answered the door, and led us up the dark wooden stairs to the third floor. Her mother lay on the unmade bed in the dim room. There was no bulb in the lamp. The ceiling was water-stained and peeling. Andrew felt the woman’s forehead. “Warm and dry,” he said. She was only breathing at a rate of four a minute. He shined a light in her right eye. “Pinpoint. Draw me up some narcan.”
“It’s going to be all right,” he said to the girl. “I’ll take care of your mother. I’m going to give her a little shot and she’ll be awake and talking to you in a minute. Don’t worry.”
I handed him the syringe. He swabbed her bicep with an alcohol prep, gave the syringe a little twirl between his fingers, then plunged the needle deep into the muscle. “Count to ten, and your mommy will be wide awake.”
The girl just stared at him. He looked back at the mother, rubbed his knuckles lightly in her chest, then a little harder when she still wouldn’t rouse. “Hello, wake up now, wake up.”
He said to the girl, “She needs a little more time to wake up. Don’t worry.” He rubbed his knuckles in her chest again, harder this time. No reaction.
“Maybe another dose?” he said to me.
“I don’t see any track marks or a needle,” I said. A crucifix hung by the door. The room was spare, neat.
“Maybe she was trying to quit and had a little lapse.” Andrew looked back at her pupils. First the right pupil. “Still pinpoint,” he said. He looked at the left. He swore. “It’s blown. She’s stroking out.”
“And she just stopped breathing,” I said.
He swore again. His hands shook.
“436,” I said into the portable. “We have a working 100.” To Andrew, I said. “Let’s get her on the floor.”
Andrew looked at the girl. He had paled. I saw the pain on his face.
“Com’on, Andrew. Let’s go,” I said. To the police officer who’d just come in the room, I said, “Get the girl out of here.”
Andrew and I moved the woman to the floor. He was focused now. The next five minutes he performed as I had never seen him before. He intubated the woman on his first try and put an IV in the jugular vein in her neck. He gave the woman epinephrine and atropine and before our backup crew arrived he had a pulse back and a blood pressure on the woman, although she was still not responding. We strapped her to a long wooden board and carried her downstairs. I saw the girl looking out at us from a neighbor’s door as we went down the stairs.
A Cat scan at the hospital showed a massive bleed in the woman’s brain. “You didn’t give her the bleed,” I told Andrew afterwards. “You did what you could. You brought her back.”
“Hardly, she’s on a ventilator. I should have been on it quicker. I only looked at that one pupil.”
“She was going to code no matter what.”
My words didn’t help.
After that call, he was in a funk for days. I knew he and his girl friend were fighting again, and that always affected him. He had a loud cell phone so whenever he answered it, I could hear the person talking to him. I usually got up and got out of the ambulance if we were parked to give him his privacy. Sometimes I couldn’t get out of the car. We were driving to area eight when he dialed his girlfriend.
I heard her voice answer. “ER.”
“It’s me,” he said. “You want to do something later?”
“No, I have other plans.”
“I really want to see you.”
“I can’t see you tonight. I have plans.”
“Can we talk or have a drink?”
“No, it’s over. You had your chance. You wanted to do this.”
“Okay, fine,” he said, and hung up.
Not two minutes later, his phone rang. “Calling back to apologize?” he said, but when he saw the incoming number, his smile wore off. “Hi, mom,” he said.
“Andy, I thought maybe we could go out to dinner tonight. I know you like the Outback Steakhouse. I want to treat you. We could use a little celebration.”
“Not tonight, mom, I’m really not feeling well.”
“Are you coming down with something? You haven’t been yourself.”
“No, I’m just tired.” He struggled to keep his voice from breaking. “Maybe this weekend, we could go out.”
“That’d be nice. I’ll have dinner in the oven for you when you get home.”
When he put his phone into his backpack, his eyes were wet. “Can we go back to Saint Fran?” he asked.
“No problem,” I said.
I waited in the ambulance for him. After ten minutes he came back out and sat heavily in the passenger seat.
“They want us covering from Kenney Park,” I said.
He nodded.
A few minutes later he said. “I just talked to ICU. They turned her machine off.”
“I’m sorry. Don’t take it out on yourself.”
“It’s not that. I know she was going to die anyway. It’s that little girl that’s killing me.”
“It was out of your hands.”
“I shouldn’t have told her.”
“You meant well.”
He sobbed quietly. “It’s just this time of year. My Dad died in Spring. I was eight. I never got to say goodbye to him.”
“You gave her the chance you never had.”
“It doesn’t make it any better.”
“He was a firefighter, right?”
Andrew nodded.
“I’m sure he’d be proud of you.”
We spent the next two hours at Kenney Park. Andrew sat on a bench by the pond. A Canadian goose and her seven fluffy goslings marched down to the water. An old woman tried to feed them bread, but the goose led her brood out into pond, where they swan to the far side. Occasionally I could hear the voices of children playing in between the sound of cars and buses passing on Vine Street. Andrew put his arms across his knees and laid his head down on them. He didn’t move for the longest time.
