A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,42

moment when it’s my turn. I casually solicit tips and advice, anything that’ll tell me what I should already know, what I’m paid to know. For my peers, we’re talking shop and telling war stories. Everyone else is looking for a laugh; I’m looking for advice.

Then one day it arrives. My first real test comes without warning, as just another call, though it’s not. This stranger, the one whose death will fall in my lap, appears from nowhere to read my fortune and decide whether my future holds a transfer to a quiet fire service or a decade of riding out the madness on an ambulance.

My partner and I are sitting around talking when the call comes in. Our radio crackles with static and then the words—person shot, multiple wounds. My skin goes cold. She’s twenty-nine, and she’s been shot six times at close range. What that is—being shot six times at close range—is beyond malice or anger. It’s pure hate. It’s death by a loved one. It happens on the far edge of town.

We’re a long way out when the dispatch comes in, and with traffic, we’re slow to arrive. I hop out of the truck, and even from here I can see her, floating in a thick pool of blood that’s congealed into red pudding. The crowd is screaming, all emotion and panic. They know the victim and the perp, they know the police can’t control them. Over the shouting, I hear the patient gurgling through blood and clenched teeth. This is the real thing. Someone has been shot but not killed, and now I’m here, alone, to deal with it. My partner is competent but new, and just an EMT, so it’s all on me. No one to fall back on, no one to help, no time to think. The patient, my patient, is dying.

We lower the stretcher. She’s nothing but holes, blood, and a pair of brown eyes locked to the right and staring at a serious brain bleed. Someone is screaming for everyone to back up, to stop touching us, to give us room. I think it’s my partner, but it could be me. It’s hard to say. My brain’s in a blender. I suction the patient’s mouth, watch blood swirl up the tubing. Then we strap her to a backboard and the stretcher’s up and moving. More suctioning. In the ambulance, air conditioner’s blowing warm air. Counting holes. Ventilating. Suctioning. Finding more holes. An IV in each arm. Fluids. Lots of fluids. A call to the hospital interrupted by a seizure. Enough seizure-stopping Versed to put down a horse. Finally, serenity.

Right before we get to the hospital, I do a final count for holes. Three in her chest, one in the neck, one in the face. I’ve slipped a hand under her head to check for head shots when her eyes pop open. I let go. Her eyes close. I press again. Her eyes pop open. There’s a firefighter riding with us, and we look at each other as it becomes clear: My finger has slipped through a bullet hole and into her skull, and whatever I’m poking in there is making her eyes open and close. I say that’s probably not good, and he nods. “No, I don’t think that’s good.”

“I’m not gonna do that again.”

“Probably best.”

At the hospital, she’s quickly assessed, further sedated, intubated, and taken to surgery.

The woman dies a little while later, though her boyfriend—barricaded in his apartment—hangs on for a few more hours. We clean the truck, restock what we used, and go back in service. We run more calls. I’m not good yet, but I can lay to rest the question of whether I’ll panic when the Big One comes. I am and always will be a Grady medic.

22

The Private Life of a Public Hospital

Grady isn’t a hospital. It’s a trauma center and a stroke center, a burn unit, a psychiatric facility, an enormous public resource. It’s a creaking bureaucracy, underfunded, overburdened, and struggling to pay its bills. Its campus is dotted with clinics and sprawls across an immodest number of city blocks in downtown Atlanta. So it’s a hospital, yes. But it’s more than that.

Grady is an ecosystem. Swirling around it at all hours of the night are creatures from every level of the food chain. There’s a woman who lives in the bus enclosure out front and sings at the top of her lungs. She’s not singing songs but hymns, and when we arrive in the