minimum wage. What must that have been like? Forget the heart, the blockage, the anatomy of this woman’s death. I want to talk to the grocery clerk.
• • •
The day before my paramedic exam, I have breakfast with Chris. Though he’s working somewhere else, we get together on occasion. I’m nervous about the exam, but he says I’m ready. Or as ready as I’m gonna be. He says the first six months will be the hardest. “You won’t know what you’re doing, and you’ll fuck things up, but probably not so bad anybody dies.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yup.”
Then he gives me three pieces of advice that he counts off on his fingers, starting with his thumb. “One: Know your protocols. Two: Don’t second-guess yourself. Three: Never let ’em see you sweat.” These should be my rules, he says. I should commit them to memory, hold on to them, live by them, call on them in moments of crisis when all hell is breaking loose.
Despite Chris’s stamp of approval, I’m nervous. The minute I pass this exam, I’m a medic. That means I’ll no longer be an observer or an assistant. I’ll be the one whose decisions determine the outcome of a stranger’s emergency. Forget the medicine, forget the extra twelve months of classes—what separates paramedic school from EMT school is that getting through and becoming a medic means accepting the mantle of final responsibility.
When I’m a medic, it will all come down to me.
BOOK THREE
Top of the World
21
Do No (Serious) Harm
A man stabs a woman in the chest. He does it with a dull pocketknife, rusted and grimy from a decade spent in his pants pocket. She screams and staggers backward, trailing blood through a crack house that’s beyond filthy, urban decay taken to a hellish extreme. To the junkies and dealers, this place is home. To the neighborhood’s elderly and infirm—poverty’s hostages—it’s a haunted house. Windows broken or missing. Door long since kicked in. Water leaking through the roof that warps the floors and turns the plaster walls into mush. A toilet no longer connected to the outside world, filled and overflowing with unimaginable waste. A rotating cast of crackheads turned genderless by desperation, who, with their lips blistered from white-hot crack pipes, give five-dollar blow jobs.
So what if a woman is stabbed in the chest? It’s just another day in the Zoo.
This is the first call I run after upgrading from EMT to medic. My first call working for Grady. I’m sitting in the passenger seat, uniform too new to fit right, with a studied look of nonchalance. The day the notice arrived in the mail that I’d passed my paramedic exam, I applied at Grady. As luck would have it, they were hiring. I underwent a physical, a written test, and a practical evaluation, smiled through an interview, then deposited my sign-on bonus. We spent three weeks in a classroom learning the Grady Way, then another three with field training officers, putting it into practice. Now I’m speeding through the streets, trying to focus but unable to think through the siren’s scream. We’re in the Bluff—the very part of town that Pike railed about three years ago during my ride-alongs—on our way to a crack house known as the Zoo, a place so notorious that someone has taken the time to spray-paint the words over the missing front door. As Biggie once said, if you don’t know, now you know.
We pull up on-scene and walk through the house, but the patient is no longer here. We find her a block away, shirtless and screaming, fingers crack-burned, lips crack-burned, pants wet from God knows what. She has a red flower of flesh bursting out from her left breast. I try to listen to her lungs—ostensibly to see how far the knife has penetrated into the chest wall, and whether her chest cavity is filling with air or blood. In reality, I just need something to do. My hands tremble, my heart flutters, there’s a weakness in my stomach. I listen but hear nothing. Which could be bad. It could also be that we’re surrounded by noises: the distant whirl of a siren, the scream of the patient, the insistent yelling of the bystanders, the shouts of the drug dealers as they warn each other of approaching cops.
I’m starting to panic. I run through Chris’s list of rules and land on “Never let ’em see you sweat.” I take a deep breath, followed by a longer exhale. It’s not helping.