live and die anonymously; they are the toothless faces of Georgia’s poor and infirm.
Jonathan and I step off the elevator. I’m immediately assaulted by the air, heavy with the stink of dirty diapers, reheated food, and unwashed bodies. We squeeze around a resident who stares but doesn’t move. He’s nothing but an open mouth, a vacant face. A geriatric still life in dirty pajamas. Down the hall, it only gets worse. Fish-eyed men in bathrobes stand frozen in corners; legless women roll around in squeaky wheelchairs. At every turn, more appear. The blind, deaf, demented, and forgotten shuffle toward us with pained yet purposeful movement, propelled, zombie-like, by the scent of real-life humans.
We press on toward the nursing station and find the place in total chaos. Files teetering on top of food trays, threatening to topple over. Nurses, a half-dozen, at least, cackle in the island dialect found in nearly all of Atlanta’s long-term care facilities. Somewhere—be it Jamaica, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, or Trinidad—someone is recruiting nurses, tons of them, making it hard to find a single nursing home not echoing with the distinctively lyrical and unrushed accent.
Of course, they ignore us. Jonathan casually reaches for a file marked 22b and asks what the problem is. The nurses stop talking, annoyed by the intrusion. Without turning toward us, one of them says, “It’s rum nine, bid twennnty-twooo-bee. Din’t eat nooo breakfuss this marnin’.”
They continue on with their conversation. Jonathan interrupts them again. “That normal?”
“Wit youuuu tink?”
“Don’t know. Don’t know him. Or is it a she?”
We obviously aren’t going to take the patient and disappear. The nurse sighs and snatches the chart. We follow her to room nine, where she stops at the foot of bed 22b and starts thumbing through the paperwork. The man in the bed, Mr. Perry, does not look good, even to my untrained eyes. His black skin is shiny and packed tight like spoiled sausage, swollen to the point of bursting. His dry lips are cracked, eyes yellow and sunken, breathing heavy and fast. He’s so febrile that I can feel the heat rising from the bed. His limbs are shriveled and contracted, his belly bloated as if he’s swallowed a frozen turkey. A feeding tube pokes out of his gut just below his ribs and runs to a bag of the brown liquidy stuff eaten by people on feeding tubes.
Jonathan points at the line. “So, if he’s on a feeding tube, how did he not eat breakfast? Because it seems to me all you’d have to do to get him to eat breakfast is turn it on. Did you forget to turn it on?”
The nurse thrusts the chart toward him. “Din’t you reeed dis?”
“Nope.”
“Line is clogged. No floooow.”
“I see.”
“And hee’s gut a feeeever.”
“For how long?”
“Staaaarted las’ night. Night staff don’t tell us nutin’.”
Jonathan and the nurse stare at each other. There’s no way that his fever, his distended abdomen, his clogged feeding tube, or even his dirty diaper are new as of the last twelve hours, but there are some things not worth arguing over. We take Mr. Perry and his chart and leave. Outside, it’s like we’ve been released from prison. Or a coffin. We wheel him to the ambulance and load the stretcher. As I climb in to get a set of vital signs, the doors slam shut behind me. I freeze.
Certainly Jonathan isn’t going to leave me, an EMT with under two hours of experience, alone in the back of an ambulance with a man whose list of complicating medical factors exceeds my own medical vocabulary. Certainly this is a joke. Then I hear the front door open, and the ambulance sways under Jonathan’s weight. The engine fires up. I poke my head through the window connecting the front of the ambulance to the back. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Jonathan smiles. “Going to the hospital. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”
“I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about him.”
“He’ll be fine. Or not. Dude’s literally on his deathbed. What’s the worst thing you could possibly do?”
I look at Mr. Perry, a feverish, bloated, heavy-breathing bag of slowly dying humanity. “You gotta get back here. Seriously.”
The ambulance starts to move.
“This isn’t funny, Jonathan. It’s incredibly far from funny.”
“You’re right. This isn’t funny. This is your job.”
I grab the blood pressure cuff and check Mr. Perry’s pressure. If he has one, I can’t tell what it is. I’ve pushed my fingers into his neck to count his thready pulse when, without warning, he