look from the broccoli to each other and back.
Obstacle clear, he slips the tube down her throat and secures it with tape. It’s time to go. There are more shocks to deliver, more CPR to do, meds to give. But really, it’s over. Everything we’ve done in the last twenty minutes has had absolutely no effect, which generally isn’t a very good sign. We snatch the patient and all of our equipment and hustle outside. Two firefighters hop in the back with Chris, extra hands to do compressions and give ventilations as he shocks and pushes drugs.
As we’re about to leave, a niece asks if she can come. This is a tough call. An ambulance is a small place, and if she starts flipping out, there’s nothing I can do about it short of kicking her out on the highway. But she seems calm, so I open the door for her. She climbs in, buckles her seat belt, and then lets out a tortured wail that continues, at varying volume, until we arrive at the hospital.
Inside we’re greeted by a coterie of doctors and nurses. Chris gives a report and the staff checks our interventions. Nothing we’ve done has helped, and they quickly wind down their efforts. Just as quickly as it began, it’s over. Her time of death is 19:23.
Broccoli has claimed another victim.
I head outside to clean and restock the ambulance. I’m sweeping up, lost in thought, when I step on Grandma’s dentures. The floor of an ambulance is steel, and the teeth break under my weight with a loud ceramic crack. I walk inside, the broken dentures in two pieces in my hand, and find the niece. She’s quiet now, much calmer than she was in the ambulance. I hold my hand out, do my best to look her in the eye, and explain that I broke the teeth. She nods, takes them into her own hands, and thanks me for everything I’ve done to help. I’m not sure I deserve forgiveness, let alone praise, but I tell her she’s more than welcome. I want to cry. I want to hug her. I want to be on an ambulance for the rest of my life.
13
The Seekers
“Does it matter if the patient lives?”
Chris, behind the wheel, takes his eyes off the road. “Damn,” he says. “Damn.”
I feel the subtle tug of the ambulance losing momentum as he takes his foot off the gas. His arms go limp as he lets go of the wheel. We’re now coasting down the road, neither of us looking to see where we’re going. “Damn,” he says again. I nod, very proud of my question. He thinks about it, comes to no conclusion, and resumes driving.
It’s early spring, about five o’clock. Outside, the evening sky is deep purple and soft orange, the way it always is in April in the South. Trees are blooming. Bugs, birds—they’re all coming back out. The humidity that will soak everything in a suffocating closeness hasn’t arrived. It is, for the moment, perfect. And that’s what we’re discussing—perfection in the form of a 911 call. It’s a frequent topic of conversation for us, something we discuss over breakfast, over dinner, late at night. Sometimes, when we’re both asleep, one of us will pop up and throw out a suggestion. What happens if he bleeds on you, pukes on you, if you slip in his growing puddle of piss? And if it really were the Perfect Call, then would you eat there?
We discuss when in the shift it would have to happen and settle on midnight. Then there’s the question of what resources we’d need at our disposal, how many patients would be involved, and what type of call—medical or trauma—it would be. We agree that we’d be on our own, no help close enough to be called in, nothing to rely on but ourselves. And it would have to be a trauma call. On Christmas we ran our second cardiac arrest together. It was frantic—a shit-kicker, is what people call it—because the woman was only having an asthma attack when we arrived. I was the first one through the door and found her sitting on the couch—sweat-drenched, hands on her knees, eyes bugging out, mouth wide in an attempt to suck in air. She looked at me, desperate, and gasped, “Don’t let me die!”
Then she died.
We dragged her to the entryway and started CPR, and shortly after that, the fire department came and helped us get her to