Christmastime Courage: An EMS Story

The call comes in around six a.m. because that’s when old people tend to get up. Rain or shine, winter or summer, sick or retired – they like to see the sun rise. I’d been at a house fire the night before and my partner had been chasing transfers, so the page for the little old lady fall doesn’t hold a lot of appeal. We grouse around, find our boots, and set off in the early morning chill with the ambulance lights bouncing off the downtown Christmas lights and the new sun cutting the horizon.

                Feeling the lack of coffee.

                Our patient is supine on the floor of a living room that is rife with collectables, Santa wrapping paper and two walkers. The obligatory poinsettias on spindly end tables. Maneuvering the cot will be a difficulty, but not impossible, so my partner initiates that project while I tend to the fall victim.

                Almost certainly a broken hip, with the classic rotating of the ankle, the shortening of one leg. She rates her pain at a ten – on a scale of one to ten - in that quiet way the elderly have of voicing a difficulty without letting it own them. She had fallen, she said, in the bathroom, but Frank had helped her to get dressed and had gotten her this far before they both gave out.    

                “He was going to take you?” My question is abstracted; I’m listening for her blood pressure.

                ‘To the hospital?’ was the tag on my unfinished question, but she misunderstands, and answers a bit archly. “Well, he always has. Taken care of me.”

                And for the first time I see Frank. He hovers in the kitchen doorway on the telephone – small, thin and bent. Not looking as though he could take care of anything this morning.

                My partner has wrestled the cot into the living room, and from there it’s easy peasy – our patient is small, our cot a modern wonder. Pillows for comfort around the hip, two steps going down the porch, across a beautifully manicured lawn and we’re in the rig with a minimum of discomfort.

                I dash back for the jump kit, across the porch and into the living room. And for the first time I see Frank.

He’s crying. He had, of course, thought we’d left, and he’s leaning against the china cupboard with his face in his hands, shoulders shaking, when I come back in.

                He’s quick. His head comes up, hands mop his cheeks, and I notice how big those hands are, How rough, with their stubby nails and scarred knuckles.

                “Forget something?” he asks drily.

                Courage wears a lot of faces. But this face, here today, is the one that’s breaking my heart.

                He’d always taken care of her. And today he couldn’t get her from the bathroom to the front door. Always held her hand, and today we’re doing that. Slept with her for probably sixty years and tonight he’ll sleep alone. In one horrid and irrevocable moment, his life has changed utterly, and he wants to know if I forgot something.

                Yeah, I forgot to be kind.

                Courage is hardly ever about the rush you get when you dash into the house fire. It’s not about extricating the accident victims from the mangled car or even doing CPR on the SIDS baby. Courage has love and compassion at its core.

                So I put on my own courage face and breach the comfort zone between myself and this man I have only just seen; and I hug him. At first he stiffens, but then he hugs me back and for a long moment we just stand there like that.

                Finally I say, “Do you want to ride to the hospital with us?” and Frank and I walk out into the new morning.

 

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*Art Source

Nicola Writes: "Dark Anniversaries"

Most EMS personnel have been on that call. The call that becomes, over time, a sort of dark anniversary, a still moment in time when we are forced to acknowledge the certain inevitability of death and our own inability to stave it off. My main character, Nicola Thomas, stepped forward this week to blog about one such call. I almost put the kibosh to it, given that it is pretty . . . well, dark. But then she pulled off a beautiful save in the last couple of paragraphs and I decided that maybe the viewpoint of one who had stood so close to death might actually be valuable as far as helping the rest of us to better live. Let me know what you think. I can always fire her.

The last curve ­­­on Kittideere Road is a broad hook, shaded by the arthritic arms of oaks and elms and scented, in the summertime, with the heady stink of joe pye weed. By July, the undergrowth at the roadside will be impassable, tangled with morning glory and maypop, and latticing over the little white cross - finally covering it in vines and blossoms and making it far more palatable.

Are roadside memorials unnerving only to EMS and fire personnel, or do they inspire a universal sort of flinching?

The Kittideere cross commemorates a truck vs tree, victim twenty years old and breathing his last on my nephew’s birthday. I arrived on the scene with the dazzle of three candles still in my eyes and had to blink against the white-hot glare of August sun before pushing my sunglasses into place.  Our patient was part way down a ravine, still in his truck and wearing a tree – the branches encroaching through the shattered windshield to pin him hopelessly, resolutely, against the seat, the cab squashed and flattened all around him.

He was alive, but he had plenty of fluid in his airway, and the irregular gurgling sounds were harsh against an innocuous backdrop of honey bee drone and bird chatter. Cantwell had already wormed his way into the cab and the final remnants of the birthday song faded from my mind as he began suction and Burwell started the Jaws.

Cutters and Spreaders and Rams – huge hydraulic tools that tear through metal like a toddler’s finger trenching frosting. Almost too heavy for me, but the adrenaline rush is an incredible thing - roars through the brain, steadies the hands – and we went to work.

Our patient’s legs were hopeless – splintered bone showing through torn jeans, blood already pouring from beneath the door and pooling on my boot. The dash was hard against his chest.
“Hurry as you can.” Cantwell’s voice was deceptively calm, encouraging in the way of a man pitching a ball to a child, and I was aware again, for only the fleetest of seconds, of the glorious summer all around us. The simple beauty of emerald leaves against boundless sky.

Then someone said “We’re losing him,” and we abandoned caution, finally snapping the door hinge and ripping our patient free from the glut and snarl of metal and elm tree.
He fell gracelessly to the woodland carpet – ugly tangle of gristle, tissue and bone – and we flopped him on a backboard and ran with him.

Of course he died. He had brown skin and a sunburst tattoo on his biceps. A picture of a little girl in his wallet.

And so, it seems to me that memorials can be a messy proposition, little white crosses maybe representing hopelessness and defeat, blood and loss.

Maybe not.

Because if simple thoughts are prayers – and I believe they sometimes are – then I pray for him each time I see the little cross set catawampus against the roots of the broken elm. This soul - the soul of a man I never knew in life - whispers to me whenever I traverse that familiar road; and it no longer seems like bad thing, this holding hands with that other world. Maybe my prayers for him are answered with his prayers for me, and so it goes, life and death and afterlife all in a continuous whirl. All of us related, all of us hoping and praying for each other, sending encouragement, hope and love across the virtual miles.

That would be a good thing, wouldn’t it? That would make it all worthwhile.   

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Keeping Pieces (Short Story)

HIPPA demands that we don’t talk about our calls, except in a very generalized fashion, and I adhere to this rule strongly enough to have tweaked the call that this story is based upon very nearly into the arena of unreality. So, here’s what is real and true – the spirit of the child, the sorrow and shock, and finally, the redemption.

For me, this is a springtime story, and no matter how many springs go by, my mind still worries the memory; and I still see this boy when the air begins to gentle into long warm days. Every EMT carries a few pieces around with them – these are mine.

 

Keeping Pieces

I took a boy on the ambulance once, and he left a piece of himself there with me. I’ve been carrying it around ever since, and sometimes in the black early morning when I am on my way to work, he morphs out of that piece and sits beside me whole. On those days, the scent of spring in the air is only a trick of the mind, lilacs and pussy willows as far away as tomorrow.
            He shimmers in death, fresh from another world that my soul knew in infancy. A place that the cold and practical adult, the professional, has forgotten, and wants no part of now.
            But anyway.
 When I knew him, he was just one of us; on the last day that I saw him, the blood seeping through his wrist bandages was tangible and real - the only color in an otherwise gray day.  I knew him, I guess, in the way that most adults know their children’s friends. He was a familiar face, a bright redhead in my yard on beautiful blue football mornings, an easy grin and a maturity that set him a little apart from the other boys.
The kid on my cot that day bore no relation whatsoever to that other bright child. My boys – the boys who decorated my furniture with their lanky forms, ate my food, made me laugh - were at that age where they were as immortal as Huckleberry Finn, and they hadn’t cried in years. If the Jabberwocky lived under their beds, he did so unacknowledged.
            But I can tell you now that two weeks later, the monsters won, and this boy was dead. His mother found him curled in the tub like half formed reality, bled out, already gone.  And in my profession, helplessness is something that seeps beneath your skin; it lays there like lividity, a large black bruise that won’t go away. And so. The pieces.
            You carry them around with you, and you work at them a little, rubbing them the way that a worried thumb will smooth a lucky stone. Sometimes you take them out and look at them, turn them in your palm, and they still look the same. Your failure mocks you.
 I should have been able to save that one.

                                                                  * * *

            Spring.
If not this spring, then the next.
It will come when you are able to let it, and everything will smell so sweet that you have to stop crying. You can’t throw those pieces away, but they seem to weigh less now. Go outside, and look at the branches of the trees against a smooth dove colored sky. Take your little girl on a bike ride, and watch the magical play of sunlight in her hair. Listen and remember. Where you came from, to whom you belong.
            Understand that it’s all right to carry those pieces around; you couldn’t get rid of them now if you tried. They soaked into your skin and they course through your veins, and they live. In you.

            We carry each other until we get to the other side.

No Big Hero: A Lighthearted EMS Parody

Happy EMS Week!

Like every EMT/firefighter you’ve ever met, I am pretty much obsessed with my profession; I have the requisite bumper stickers and tee shirts, even a collectible “Roy and Johnny” toy fire helmet. Birthdays involve extrication gloves, stethoscopes, EMS pants, and my yahoo page is littered with updates from every department within a seventy mile radius.

            In fact, HERE is the article that hit my inbox the other day and became the inspiration for this blog. 

You don’t have to read the whole thing, lol! Not that it isn't well written – truly, it is. And God knows, I can actually relate to most of it, as can almost any emergency worker. But it is, perhaps, a tad melodramatic, no? Maybe somewhat officious? All of which lead my partner and I, regrettably, to play with it. I share with you now the unfortunate results:

• Until you have spent eight hours on scene with your pants falling down inside your bunker gear because you forgot to put a belt on when you left the house – Don’t judge us.

• Until you have hit the patient’s house at a dead run only to slip in vomit and slide across the room like Babe Ruth stealing home (halting at the feet of your “non breathing” patient, who remarks. “Oh my.”)  – Don’t judge us.

• Until you forget to set the brake on the tanker and don’t realize it until said vehicle is sliding down the boat ramp into the lake – Don’t judge us. 

• Until you've answered a call with shampoo still in your hair – Don’t judge us

• Until you have answered a call for a non responsive medical alarm, torn down the front door and tromped mud across a stranger’s living room, only to hear the “patient” screaming in terror from their shower “Who iiiiiissss it??” – Don’t judge us. 

• Until you've gotten thoroughly lost, after dark, in your ambulance en route to a “trouble breathing” and been subjected to dispatch instructions that involve turning “right at the big Christmas tree and left again after the duck blind” – Don’t judge us.

Too often, our job actually is dramatic – at least when it isn't mind-numbingly boring. We have learned to go from zero to one hundred on the adrenaline scale in five seconds flat. Thankfully, we've also learned to laugh at ourselves, and we really don’t subscribe to the “hero” nonsense at all. Very simply, we love what we do – more than that, it’s kind of hard to get that hero-swagger right when your pants are falling down beneath your bunker gear.          

"But a Necessity" : Rainy Days, Updates, and an Excerpt

Showers are but a necessity

Splashed to chase the thirst away -

                                    Theodora Onken 

Ohmygosh, what an insane week this has been, everything from fires to flooding in our little area, and multiple calls in both stations. We’ve outdone ourselves with basement pump-outs, gas leaks and rescue calls, whew. Spring is here, loud and brash! This picture is of an old bridge in our area finally giving way to the flood waters; when the news carried this, they called our creek a river, which made us all smile. By July, you’ll be able to take your kids wading without a problem.

Much the same chaos in the writing world! This week, I have joined Linked and Scribd, and two other online groups as well, in an effort to float my stories out to you! Too much, you say?? Perhaps! Time will tell, lol. In the meanwhile, I am excited – yes, truly! – to be diving into the second round of edits on my novel. I am relieved to note that very few corrections are needed, but more than that, I am thrilled that I still like my characters. I had worried that after this brief hiatus away from them, they might have gone stale for me, but thankfully this is not the case. Below I’m posting an excerpt from an early chapter where my two main characters, John Santiago and Nicola Thomas have their first significant encounter. Let me know what you think!

In the big bedroom upstairs, she burrowed, still dressed, beneath the covers, and watched him as he took off his shirt and set his wallet on the nightstand. He played with the notion of removing more clothing, but in the end stretched out beside her in his wife beater and dress slacks.

“That’s a great tattoo,” she whispered, tracing a delicate finger along his right bicep. “Oh my, it’s a really big black bear claw. Boy scouts?”

“No sweetie, not quite.” Distracted by her nearness, the swell of her hip beneath the blankets, he did not elaborate, instead brushed a kiss across the base of her throat.

“What else?” She had stiffened at his touch.

He obediently turned to show her his other bicep, the semper fi inked in red there.

“Marines?”

“A few years ago.”

“I can’t have sex with you.”

“Well, sugar puss, I never asked you to,” he said gently. “I guess we’ll either get around to it or we won’t, okay?”

“I can’t because I think it might hurt. I lost a baby and I’m sore inside and what did you call me?”

He allowed himself a moment to decipher her rushed words, to net the crucial part of her message. “You lost a baby? Just recently?”

“About a month ago,” she nodded. “And I know I’m all right, but I don’t feel so good, okay?”

“Not okay. Did you go to a doctor?”

“Yes, I got all cleaned out inside. It was horrible.”

“And?”

“And now I just feel puny. Like a stupid old hollowed-out pumpkin.” She squeezed her eyes closed as though to hide from him. “I’m sorry I got you here in my bed and now I won’t do it with you and…and I’m sorry, okay?”

“Sweetheart, please slow down.” His hands found her beneath the blankets, and he rubbed her belly where her shirt rode up. “Tell me about it.”

“I hated that baby. So much. I just wished it away until it was gone.”

“No, that’s not how that works, chica. Unless some money changed hands?”

At last she turned on her side to look at him. “I’ve only ever slept with Tony. I was so sure I loved him.”

“Well then, you probably did. Do you still?”

“No, not at all.”

“Okay then.”

“What about your Cindy?”

“What about Cindy? There is no Cindy. Poof, she’s gone, okay?” He tucked the comforter around her shoulders. “And you and me, chica, we’re only laying here, all our clothes on, see? Nothing to fret about.”

“Okay.” She knuckled her eyes and linked her fingers into prayer position beneath her chin. “I have to sleep, I feel a little sick and dizzy, okay?”

“Close your eyes, munequita.” He reached for the lamp switch, throwing them into darkness, and returned his hand to the warm patch of skin between shirt hem and pajama bottom.

“I’m sorry I’m such a freakin’ disappointment,” she murmured into her pillow and he had to strain to catch her words.

“Not to worry, sweetie.”  

Easily said, but he knew that he would lie awake for the next few hours. That, another day, he would examine his reasons for staying, and come away uncertain.

An Introduction by Author Lucy Crowe

Hello! I’m so excited to be writing my first-ever blog - mostly, I think, because I have known from a very early age that much of life deserves to be recorded. I was the nerd kid on the school bus with a notebook in my lap, the teenager stuffing her journal under her mattress, and now, the book mouse at the fire station who is forever plugging away on the lap top.

It’s okay! I’ve found love and acceptance amongst my peers in spite of my oddity!

About that.

Webster’s defines a peer as “a person who is equal to another in abilities, qualifications, age, background and social status,” but the thesaurus nails the relationship in a far clearer fashion with “cohort, buddy, partner.”

My peers are EMTs and firefighters. They populate two separate and very rural fire stations and share my life – my coffee, my sleeping bag, my little-pink-sugars – for days at a time. Ours is a unique existence, in which we are not only dependent on each other in so many ways, but we also actually live together. This situation, combined with the occasional hair-raising adrenaline-laced call, has made for more than one intriguing tale.

Which brings me to my second group of peers – the story-tellers. These folks share my gift/eccentricity/curse.  They understand my endless quest to set life to words, to form pretty phrases around the blasé for maximum palatability. Mostly, we exist for each other within our laptop screens, where we buzz encouragement back and forth via emails and writer’s forums. And so, ours is an unusual, but highly valued rapport. A kinship, of sorts.

Beyond peers, of course – and certainly of more importance – is my family. A husband and children who never quit shining for me, loving parents, brilliant and noisy siblings.  They give my days texture and beauty, and their personalities have breathed life into year upon year of my existence.

As well as filling out the pages of my stories.

And so - much to write about! And many reasons to be happy!

Thank you so much for visiting my brand new blog! I hope to see you again!

Here is a picture of my lovely kitty Gothika, who generally answers to the absurd and disgraceful nickname of Fatman. He has been perched on the back of my chair, just over my shoulder, throughout the entirety of this posting, and was most insulted when I failed to mention him in my circle of loved ones. His expression could only be described as “apoplectic”, lol.

Yes, this is him. “Admire,” says he