not us. Not anymore.
Marty and I have single-handedly raised the dead and vow, from this day on, that anyone not on this ambulance, not part of this two-man army, is an outsider. They don’t understand what we’re doing, they aren’t operating at our frequency. It’s us against the world, and so far as we can tell, we’re right. You can’t tell us a damn thing.
Our revolt starts immediately and all at once. Most of it, oddly, has nothing to do with patient care, and the little that does has to do with doctors. Those at the top of every food chain exercise their prerogatives, and for doctors, that includes holding everyone below them in at least mild contempt. There are any number of reasons, but somewhere on the list, in all likelihood, is that many doctors started out as nerdy kids who were laughed at and picked on and probably still are, outside of the hospital. Everyone experiences this at some point—being the odd man out—but some people never get over being slighted. Maybe they internalize it, let it fester, until one day, years later, they’re a doctor. And there, before them, are dozens of people who aren’t. Suddenly, it’s revenge of the nerds.
Marty and I get along with a few, but as a group, they’re rude and dismissive, aloof to the point of arrogance. We’ve decided from now on, we’ll simply ignore them. There’s a handful of drugs and procedures we’re allowed to administer only after calling the hospital and discussing it with a physician. We stop doing this. We just proved we know what we’re doing, and we figure that if anyone comes around asking why we never bothered to get permission, we’ll point to the patient’s outcome, which we’ve already decided will be good. How could it not be? And since the patient will live, since we’ll save him, what more can anyone say? How do you argue with the result when the result is a life saved?
• • •
That’s how we’re dealing with the doctors, but we’re focused on more pressing matters, more righteous causes. Like pissing off the fire department.
Though we work together—same mission, same calls, same patients—for some reason, medics and firefighters can’t get along. The fire guys consider us disorganized, rumpled, undisciplined, lazy, and jaded, while we look at them as dim-witted oafs who geek out on gear while giving poor patient care. In our opinion, they’re best suited for the job of ferrying equipment to and from the ambulance. Sure, there are plenty of good firefighters out there, people I’ve worked with over the years whose arrival in the doorway tells me that things have just gotten easier. But there are others who can’t flush a toilet without instructions. As people, we get along, but as uniformed members of our respective departments, we generally do not. Yet we have to work together; we need each other. We exist as two halves of a strange whole, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in miniature. There is no relief—no way to extricate ourselves long enough to take a deep breath—and so it festers, and everything is a pissing match, a food fight, a shooting war.
Marty and I aren’t the only ones. Every Grady medic has stories of firefighters who have bungled patient care or picked fights on-scene. For Marty and me, the issue boiled over at a swimming pool. We were dispatched to a possible drowning and arrived to find a seven-year-old boy on the deck of a public pool, dripping wet, blue, and not breathing. Fire arrived right after we did and must have seen us kneeling over the kid. Or maybe not. It’s hard to imagine how they could have seen us, seen what was happening, and then walked away. Which is what they did. The captain grumbled something about this not being their call, and they turned and disappeared. Marty and I were left with the boy. We scooped him up, carried him to the ambulance, and started to ventilate him. After three puffs, the boy jerked upright and vomited a liter of warm stomach water all over Marty. We stood there in shock—with little chewed-up bits of hot dog swimming around the ambulance floor—as the boy gasped and looked around, as shocked as we were.
Though we’d saved him, we’d been abandoned. What if he hadn’t started breathing again? What if his heart stopped and he was no longer a kid in need of air but a soon-to-be-dead child in need of CPR? A