00/01/12
Well, sometimes this job is pretty depressing.

Last night we got called out at 0130 to a report of a man trapped by furniture.

Yep, that’s right, a man trapped by furniture. On the way to a call like that you always know you’ll go home with a story to tell. Usually it’ll be something you can chuckle over for awhile or relate to your friends as a “Jeez, you shoulda been there” story. Unfortunately it didn’t turn out like that.

When we got there we found a man who lived in his family’s basement. He was sitting in a chair behind a desk that was piled with garbage of all descriptions. The door to the room would only open about halfway because of garbage and crap piled in the room. This was obviously where he lived. The rest of the house was well appointed, middle class. A standard subdivision house. It was reasonably well kept, certainly no worse than most. This room was horrible though. Dirty dishes were piled haphazardly; assorted trash littered the floor. It looked like a bomb went off in a dumpster. There was no place to walk, I had to edge sideways through the door and crouch just inside. It was impossible to move further.

When we entered the house his wife told us “He’s out now” and disappeared back into the rest of the house. We didn’t see her again until it was time to leave and we needed a signature on the report

It’s not like this guy was particularly old, he was 49. He was, however chronically ill. Skinny as a rail, and pathetic.

I sat with him for a while until the ambulance came. He wasn’t badly hurt, mostly bruised and scared. He had been plugging in an appliance and had fallen between his desk and a wall; he was trapped there for an hour before anyone heard his calls. Eventually, his wife came in and found him. She called us to get him out. Before we got there his 20-year-old son freed him.

What I found was a tiny, frail guy sitting in this little filthy hovel. Once I had assessed him we started to talk. The story he gave me was of a man who was a burden to his family because of his illness, a man who was treated as a bother and constantly reminded how much of a weight he was to all of them. A man who was made to live worse than a pig because he wasn’t physically able to do anything about it.

The saddest thing to me was that he didn’t tell me this story as a complaint. He told me it conversationally, he told it to me as if it should be naturally obvious to anyone who looked. He told it to me like he deserved to live like he did. He told me his story as I tried to shield myself with emergency medical procedure. I listened to him and held his hand. I tried to focus on the treatment of the patient, but there wasn’t much of that to do. The truth of the matter was that he wasn’t injured, just a bit sore. He needed to be checked out in the hospital anyway, as far as I was concerned, if only to escape that room for awhile.

Once the ambulance came and I passed him over to their care, I shook his hand and wished him well. He smiled and thanked me for my time. He apologized for being a bother.

 As my crew trooped out of the house I looked at his family. A teen-aged daughter and twenty-something son looked back at me, a sullen wife stood and smoked a cigarette. She signed the report, and we left.

It struck me as I got into my truck to return to the firehall…
Other than the first sentence I heard when I came into the house, no one other than the patient had spoken to me or my crew, not one word. They just stared, silent.

I have no idea what’s going on in that house, and truth be told I only know one side of the story.

I spent the day depressed by what I had seen and heard, I wondered how a human could live like that, and how much longer he would.
 
 
 

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