we’ve dropped forty feet. There’s nothing but massive oral trauma. No one else to turn to, no one to come and shepherd my patient into more capable hands. The call I feared all those years ago has come knocking, and there’s nothing to do but run it.
I reach for the suction.
You wouldn’t think a single mouth contains so many teeth until they’re knocked loose and sent running for cover. The tongue—always in the way—once sliced in half, has an evil twin. There’s more blood than you could possibly imagine. We strap him to a backboard and begin the steep climb back up the hill but stop every few feet to set him down and suction out the blood. There’s just so much of it. And he’s talking, I think, or not. Could be garbled Spanish, could be a gurgle. He’s on the stretcher, in the ambulance, in motion.
Oxygen. Then more suctioning, more suctioning. I roll the entire backboard to the left because I can’t keep up with the flow. Then he’s not talking, not gurgling, nothing. I roll him back and he reanimates. The blood again. More suction. There are teeth on the floor of the ambulance. And then we’re there. Through the doors and past triage, a nurse calling from behind us that he’s headed to Trauma Two. Surgeons are waiting. They take one look and it’s off. Off to another floor, to an OR suite, to a place where they can sort out the pieces and begin the long job of reconstructing a deconstructed face.
By then I’m already gone. Talking to an ER tech named Errol about basketball, about Lebron, about everything but the call. It doesn’t occur to me until later that I finally ran the one call I never wanted to run, that the panic I felt all those years ago was the panic of someone else and the person here now simply did his job. Things occasionally come full circle. Sometimes a question posed in the beginning gets answered in the end. And so there it is—a call, The Call, came in, and I showed up. No panic, no mistakes, no doubt. Just me in the ambulance with a horribly mangled face.
I’m tempted to call it perfect.
39
Long Way Gone
At only six weeks, my son gets sick. What started as a fever turns to pneumonia, to a stay in the ICU. He heals, because that’s what kids do, but his lungs aren’t the same. He’s sick again in July, then in August, and after a few months of hope, he’s knocked flat in the first few days of November. His pulmonologist suggests we pull him from daycare. I switch to part-time, and like that, I’m no longer a full-time paramedic. The decision is so easy, so obvious, so incidental, it’s almost like it never happened. One day I wake up and I’m a stay-at-home dad who happens to ride an ambulance a few nights a week.
I pick up only night shifts, which means getting home at five A.M., catching an hour of sleep, and then being up and on the move with a nine-month-old. Every week I work different days and slightly different hours, and the variation brings forgotten people back into my life. As I run into old partners and friends, I realize that the once new are now seasoned, and many of the once good are now burned out. For a while it’s a return to the old days, when everything was new and fun and I couldn’t wait to get in. But there’s a difference between being new and feeling new. The excitement fades.
In December 2011 we find out Sabrina is pregnant, and by August there’s a second child in the house. Now I’ve got two kids at home on an hour’s sleep. I cut my nights back from three a week to two. Occasionally, I work one.
Early on in EMT school, my instructor told us that nerves were to be expected—that when a bad call came in, we should expect some excitement and maybe a little dread, and that while we were on-scene and in the ambulance and afterward, when the patient was no longer in our care, we should expect the adrenaline, the fast heart rate, the hyper-focus. That feeling, he said, was what would keep us from making mistakes; it would keep us zeroed in. When it went, we should, too.
That feeling probably left me a while ago, but I don’t realize it until I’m kneeling on a balcony outside