A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,18
The feeling is electric, being an insider, knowing that should anything happen, I’ll be the one called out to fix it. Every word the radio breathes into the stale air of the station sets me on fire. EMS is the greatest show I’ve ever seen, except it’s not a show, it’s all real. No, it’s more than that—it’s reality distilled and boiled down to its essence. It’s life and (hopefully) death, and unlike the general public, I’m invited and allowed to wander freely amid the debris. So send me anything. I’m on a 911 ambulance. I’ll run whatever you’ve got.
9
Killers
Within a month Jerry has been fired. I walk into the station one morning to be confronted by two supervisors and the director of operations. They sit me down, say they need to ask a few questions. Someone asks if I want anything, and out of sheer panic, I say that water would be nice. The director of operations is short and bald, fat on an epic scale. We’re in the bunk room and the fan is off. He’s starting to sweat. From the next room we can hear ice plinking into a glass, the tap running. When the water comes, I drink half the glass.
I wonder why two supervisors and the director have come this far, why they didn’t just fire me by phone. Maybe there’s a chance I can talk my way out of this, whatever it is. Hell, I haven’t been here long enough to do anything right, let alone something that’ll get me fired. As for Jerry, well, he probably deserved to get fired. He has a shitty attitude toward patients, toward our supervisors, toward the job in general. How and why he got into EMS, I don’t know, but he stayed too long. Every medic in the county knows it. Even I know it. And that’s saying something. These last few weeks have been so disorienting, I hardly know my own name. It’s been all I can do to keep from drowning.
Scarcely a minute has passed during which I haven’t learned something new, something that could theoretically make the difference in someone else’s life. How to talk on the radio, talk to a doctor, talk to patients. How to do all the things I learned in school—size up a scene, backboard, dress a wound—not just properly but quickly. How to start IVs in a moving ambulance, how to start them on the old, the sick, the injured, the nearly dead, even the clinically dead. I have no experience with any of this, so for the first few shifts, whatever Jerry says, I do. However, it quickly becomes clear that Jerry has lost his way.
As the crew of a 911 ambulance in Fulton County, we have a simple mandate: Transport everyone who calls. Whatever the reason. We can’t say no. If they call, they get a ride. The woman who calls at three in the morning because she’s had a nightmare? Transport. Toothache? Transport. The guy with back pain who’s clearly faking and just needs a ride downtown? Transport. But Jerry doesn’t transport. Not these people and, if he can help it, not anybody. One night we run a stabbing outside a nightclub. The place is going nuts like Mardi Gras in a strip mall. Two girls—dressed to party and drunk on cheap liquor—start fighting. Someone breaks a beer bottle and stabs our patient in the neck. It’s not a throat-slashing kind of thing, but the wound is nasty, like raw hamburger, and after I bandage it, I tell the girl she needs to come with us. But she’s not having it. She has no time for us, no time for a tetanus shot, no time for stitches, and certainly no time for the hospital. Before I can launch into all the reasons she needs to go, Jerry tells her if she starts walking away, we have no right to chase her down. We’ll simply let her go. No hospital. No bill. No questions.
When I bring it up later, Jerry brushes me off. He says it’s her choice, and who are we to tell her what to do? Seems to me we’re precisely the people to tell her what to do, but he rolls over and goes to sleep.
This is the story I’m waiting to tell the director and the supervisors, the one I assume they’ve all shown up to hear. Instead, the director says, “Tell me about his girlfriend.”