leap into a higher gear.
“Out of my way!” she yelled at the top of her voice. “The cavalry is coming! A 1-8 to the rescue!”
There was no one to yell at, so I gripped the hand-hold above the passenger seat and laughed as if she wasn’t mental. I thought, perhaps, that a certain amount of craziness was needed to work a nightshift out of Pitt Street.
To work a nightshift on an all-female crewed vehicle heading toward a darker part of the city.
I wasn’t worried. Not really. Cathy was larger than life and would scare any other crazy person out there with her bravado and rip-shit-bust attitude.
I kinda wanted to be Cathy when I grew up.
She also wore steel-capped boots and had the biggest industrial looking torch hanging from her leather belt; she knew how to use it, too. She called it her Tommyknocker, whatever that meant.
The street lights flashed past the windows of the ambulance, strobing to the sound of Cathy’s singing. I didn’t recognise the song, but it was catchy. I was even humming along with her when we pulled up to the residential street.
Cars sat up on cinder blocks, tricycles lay on their sides in overgrown front yards, a pair of sneakers hung over the power lines in front of a house we passed with boarded up windows. Lights shone behind sheet covered openings on others; the smell of fried meat wafted on the air when I wound down my window to better read the numbers on the letterboxes.
Half the houses didn’t have letterboxes, so I guessed which one was our target by a haphazard method of deduction.
No one stood out on the side of the road to greet us.
“Nice of ‘em to show us the way,” Cathy muttered as I hit the button on the GPS to show us ‘on scene’.
We didn’t hurry out of the vehicle. Cathy clutched the keys in her hand and stared at the address in contemplation. Usually, we tucked the keys up under the visor, so any ambo could climb in and start the truck up. Usually, though, we weren’t in a neighbourhood where a stolen ambulance would make for a nice way to pass the evening.
“Come on,” Cathy said, sounding serious for the first time. “Let’s check the place out, at least.”
We grabbed our gear and trudged up the broken concrete path, eyes darting from shadow to shadow, sweat coating my palms. Nothing jumped out at us and when Cathy took the first step up onto the front porch, the door swung open and an emaciated looking young man stared out of the gloom of the house with eyes too big for his skeletal looking skull.
“Took your time,” he muttered.
“Came from the city,” Cathy said matter of factly. “Is the patient conscious?”
“Still out cold in her room.”
“Lead on, then,” Cathy instructed, sounding more authoritative than I had heard her yet.
It was all about appearances, I was learning. Look like you knew what you were doing and the public believed you knew what you were doing. Of course, most of the time, we did know what we were doing.
But knowledge and actions were two different things. Something else I was learning.
The patient was lying on the floor, surrounded by blankets. She was breathing; her chest rising and falling in a slow and steady rhythm.
“How long did she seize?” I asked.
“Donno, do I? Just heard a sound, came in here and she was fitting, and then she stopped, like, a minute, I guess, later.”
I took her pulse. Steady at eighty beats per minute. Her blood pressure was one twenty over eighty. Respirations fourteen and steady. She didn’t respond to voice, or touch. Cathy attached the electrodes and printed out a strip from the ECG machine.
The girl wouldn’t wake up.
“I’m stumped,” Cathy admitted a minute or so later.
“Load and go?” I asked.
Cathy bit her lip and then shook her head. “I’ll see if a Delta unit is nearby. Long way to hospital from here and she could code.”
Cathy stepped out of the room, while I slid in an IV as a precaution. The girl still didn’t wake up. I looked around the floor for drug paraphernalia. Nothing stood out to me, but I wasn’t an expert or anything.
Wind against the window. The flickering light of a TV. Old tobacco smoke and the stringent scent of weed. The girl breathed steadily.
Cathy came in and said, “Delta 10’s on his way. They sent him as backup and forgot to tell us.”
Two AOs on a truck and