Run Sheet
01/12/07
Some things you never get hardened to.
I've seen a lot in the last nineteen or so years on this job.
I've seen tragic and violent death and dismemberment, I've seen suicide and murder. I've seen parents left childless and children left parentless. Those things bother you no matter how long you do the job.
The dead are horrible enough to deal with, but the real horror sometimes is the living.
This morning I was taking part at a pancake breakfast hosted by my children's school. It was 0730 and I was happily flipping pancakes on the grill. Then, like most of the really awful things in my life start, the pager went off.
"Hall 9 Assist with a lift at the Pine Grove Mobile Home Park 22309 Matthews Street unit 24"(not the actual address)
With a curse I handed one of the other dads my flipper and took off at a run. "Assist with a lift" usually means that the ambulance attendants need help with someone who is three hundred pounds or more. It's usually a quick call.
Pine Grove Mobile Home park is a collection of old single wide mobile homes wedged into an area of about ten acres. The homes are placed cheek-by-jowl and are in various states of repair. The standards have slipped there over the years. It used to be one of the better tended and maintained mobile parks around, but in the past few years it's become less and less nice. It's looking pretty sad as a mater of fact. We're in there every few weeks because the population of the place is quite elderly. We go in for cardiac arrests and strokes on a regular basis. we know the place pretty well.
As I walked up to the door this morning i took note of the oxygen generator on the front porch and the clear flexible tubing snaking across the floor of the house. Someone here is on constant oxygen, that's never a good thing.
An elderly lady with a nasal oxygen cannula greeted us at the door and told us her husband had fallen out of bed and she couldn't get him back in. The ambulance wasn't coming, he only needed to be put back in bed, he wasn't hurt. No problem, we do this sort of stuff all the time.
We walked to the bedroom and I looked around. There were twenty-year-old pictures on the wall of smiling families posed at the Sears picture studio, daughters and sons lined up on the hallway wall. Years lined up there. In the walk down thirty feet of hallway I watched their family grow up. When we got to the bedroom at the end I turned the corner to find and old, wasted man lying on the bedroom floor looking beaten, staring at the carpet the way my old dog used to just before I had him put down.
He looked up at me as I walked in and greeted him. There was embarassment and shame in his eyes, there was hopelessness, there was pain. I looked back at his wife. Their eyes reflected each other's there was love, but beyond it all there was despair.
Carl had been a destroyerman, a chief petty officer in the Canadian Navy. There were pictures of all his ships arrayed on the dark, cheap wood panelling of his stuffy little bedroom. I asked him about them as I assessed him for injury and planned how to best pick him up without breaking him. He had bone cancer, he was terminal and had been given two weeks to live, a month at the most. He lay there in agony. We sat with him while he took some morphine tablets so we could lift him up again. He threw up for awhile into a plastic bag while I sat there and held him. My partner couldn't take it and had to leave the room. I sat there and held him while he spewed. Between heaves he told me about the navy and his ships, his adventures and his war. We sat together for nearly an hour while he finished throwing up and took his drugs. He had to hold my hand to get the leverage to swallow the water, it was that much of an effort. I tied up the plastic bag of vomit and he grabbed my arm. In a fierce whisper he said,
"My wife is color blind, if there's any blood in that don't tell her!"
There wasn't much else in it.
When he was ready I held him tight, held him close and lifted him gently into bed. I pulled the covers up for him and made sure he was comfortable. He shook my hand and wished me well. The smell of his dying body is still clear in my memory.
I walked out, along that hallway looking at his family grow up all over again. I thought of the phone calls that would soon be going out, and I wondered if they would know or care about what had gone on. I wondered if they would ever know that there are much worse things than dying.
Half an hour after that I was flipping
pancakes again, and trying my best to be polite with the people who asked
me what the call had been.