It took us a minute to find the place because it was Joe's first solo mission as operator/engineer of E41, and he was nervous. You could hear it in his voice every time he came back to 911 over the radio. That high-pitched adrenaline fueled shakey and too fast way of talking that leaves the dispatchers scratching their heads and telling you that you broke up, to retransmit. He turned north instead of south off of Locust Street, so we had to double-back. It was only a matter of thirty seconds, but you could tell the mistake threw him off his game. Joe and I are alike in that regard; perfect isn't good enough when it comes to doing the job well.
Once we got to South Park Street, there was no mistaking which house it was. Family members were running up and down the driveway looking frantically at the engine as we approached, and one of them was standing sentinel at the end of the drive, motioning toward the ground floor apartment. As soon as I heard the hiss of the airbrake I jumped out of the cab and around the truck, grabbed our basic EMS bag, and headed toward the man who had been posted at the end of the driveway, who was now headed toward me.
"SHE IS NOT BREATHING!" He was red-faced and his eyes were crazy with panic, like an injured wild animal's. He was massive and as I scanned his face I thought to myself, this guy is either easily rocked by stress, or there is something developmentally wrong with him. I moved past him toward the door, where there were two women holding each other and sobbing.
"Is she breathing? Is she conscious?" I asked them as I approached, hoping I could get more information out of these two than I suspected I could out of the neanderthal who was now following behind me.
"OH GOD!!!!! OH GOD, SHE ISN'T BREATHING!!! I THINK SHE HAD A STROKE!!!!" Everyone in this place was crazy, wild-eyed, and panicked. For an instant I thought about how I might react if it was my grandmother who wasn't breathing, if the sirens were for her instead. In the next instant my brain switched to the machine that takes over during emergencies; the one that makes my hands work before my mind tells them to and can reach instinctively into the EMS bag and find whatever tool I need without looking. Our job is to mitigate other peoples' disasters. You have to let the machine do its work.
I entered the apartment and found an elderly woman laying on a hospital bed in what appeared to be the living room. There was another family member standing at her side and doing what appeared to be supporting her head, and the sobbing women and the neanderthal had all followed me in. I positioned myself opposite the man supporting her head, but when I got closer to him I realized that he was actually tilting her head down into her chest and successfully cutting off her airway. I looked up at him and he looked up at me and he had the crazy eyes too, and I thought, where in the hell am I.
Over the crying and the shouts of "KEEP FIGHTING GRANDMA!!" I asked the man at the head of the bed to step away, to which he responded with something that I can only assume was English. As soon as he let go of her head the woman sucked in with a great, deep, snoring respiration. I tilted her forehead back and lifted her chin to fully open her airway, and the snoring respirations became deep, regular in-breaths and out-breaths. With my ear still a few inches above her mouth, I looked around the room and could not wrap my head around the level of panic contained within. Everyone in the room, with the exception of me and my patient, looked like they were perhaps the product of inbreeding, and I knew that there was nothing I could say that would stop the flow of tears, or the pleading for grandma to keep fighting or the need for me to do something more than a head-tilt/chin lift despite the fact that grandma was now breathing quite well and really only appeared to be in a very deep sleep. I checked her pulse next, and it was very strong and very regular, much like her respirations.
"When is the last time she ate? Is she diabetic?" I posed the question to everyone in general, and it was the head-holding mumbler who responded first. His eyes looked so sad and I could tell he wanted desperately to help in some way, so I strained my ears to understand him and said a silent prayer that whatever he said would be useful. "Shejustwonteatnuthin" is what came out, and at that instant the medics from the squad came in. "Let's get a glucose check going," I told them, and the lead medic shot me one of those knowing "we come here nearly every day" looks. And as we were pulling away in our big red truck after they pushed D50 in the squad to fix her low blood glucose level and grandma started to come around, I thought about all of the lives that pass through our hands as Firefighter/EMTs, and the responsibility of what we're doing hit me. Even when you're called by crazy people and it's not a life or death situation, they call 911 expecting the cavalry and your truck rolls up and you have to be the cavalry. Each time. She said to me, "We are the the blue bloods, Em, no matter how the day greets us." And that is right.
