The Things You Can Never Forget
The other night I saw something I'm never going to forget.
It started not three minutes into my shift on the Squad. My partner Mike, an EMT Intermediate with years of experience, and I were dispatched to a residence for an elderly woman vomiting blood. Internal bleeding for sure, and our regular truck was out of service. We didn't have a suction unit on the Ford Explorer that we were responding in, just a manual powered turkey baster type device.
When we pull up the whole house is dark, but thats nothing new. We grab our truama and O2 gear and hike up a steep set of icy stairs to the front door of a decript old cottage. I briefly think that its gonna be a bitch wrestling this woman down to the coming ambulance.
A gastro intestinal bleed has a smell quite unlike any other imaginable. Its kind of a mix between rotting dead skin and shit mixed with blood, which is exactly what it is. As soon as we get in the front door, that awful order assualts our noses and we become mouth breathers for the remainder of the time in the house.
The woman is a fragile, her skin so alabaster its nearly transulucent and from the look of her shes already dead. Sitting on the toilet, covered in her own black blood in a most undignified pose.
We waste no time, Mike gets her under the armpits and we drag her into the kitchen, propping her up in a time worn chair just as the ambulance arrives outside. Her blood pressure is about 60, way too low for her to be concious but in order to make a liar out of the medical books, she babbles about how the dinner she made is going to burn. Her husband just watches as I try to get a pulse and lung sounds.
The medics show up and tell us we should probably get her in the bus.
No shit.
We wrap her in sheets and white towels in order to protect her from the twenty something degree night. As I'm carrying her down in a stair chair with an AMR medic, she closes her eyes and her face took on the most peaceful and serene look I have ever seen. When we transfer her to the gurney to load her into back of the ambulance her eyes flutter a bit and the smile remains, gingerly her frail old wax hands pull a towel up around her head like a nun and she lays back in the gurney.
I thought for sure I had watched her die, we all did. That peacefull look was just too strangely calm not to be staring into the face of angel. When we went back to the station I kept catching whiffs of that horrible smell, the GI blood. I found a splotch on my pants and went after it with alcohol wipes, trying to wash out the scent of death.
The next day my cell phone rang. Mike had talked to one of the doctors and found out that the woman hadn't only lived but was doing remarkably well for someone who lost nearly a third of their blood.
Maybe we got there just in time to get her to the hospital for a blood transfusion, by all laws and medical rules, she should have been dead. But for some reason the eighty some odd year old lady was thriving the last I heard.
That look, the look of utter peace and serenity is something that I will always remember. I'm certain she was looking down the tunnel, into the light. They say you often see the faces of loved ones and hear their voices when looking into that tunnel. Maybe some long lost relative of hers was smiling down on her soothingly, his voice gently telling her: "Not yet."
It started not three minutes into my shift on the Squad. My partner Mike, an EMT Intermediate with years of experience, and I were dispatched to a residence for an elderly woman vomiting blood. Internal bleeding for sure, and our regular truck was out of service. We didn't have a suction unit on the Ford Explorer that we were responding in, just a manual powered turkey baster type device.
When we pull up the whole house is dark, but thats nothing new. We grab our truama and O2 gear and hike up a steep set of icy stairs to the front door of a decript old cottage. I briefly think that its gonna be a bitch wrestling this woman down to the coming ambulance.
A gastro intestinal bleed has a smell quite unlike any other imaginable. Its kind of a mix between rotting dead skin and shit mixed with blood, which is exactly what it is. As soon as we get in the front door, that awful order assualts our noses and we become mouth breathers for the remainder of the time in the house.
The woman is a fragile, her skin so alabaster its nearly transulucent and from the look of her shes already dead. Sitting on the toilet, covered in her own black blood in a most undignified pose.
We waste no time, Mike gets her under the armpits and we drag her into the kitchen, propping her up in a time worn chair just as the ambulance arrives outside. Her blood pressure is about 60, way too low for her to be concious but in order to make a liar out of the medical books, she babbles about how the dinner she made is going to burn. Her husband just watches as I try to get a pulse and lung sounds.
The medics show up and tell us we should probably get her in the bus.
No shit.
We wrap her in sheets and white towels in order to protect her from the twenty something degree night. As I'm carrying her down in a stair chair with an AMR medic, she closes her eyes and her face took on the most peaceful and serene look I have ever seen. When we transfer her to the gurney to load her into back of the ambulance her eyes flutter a bit and the smile remains, gingerly her frail old wax hands pull a towel up around her head like a nun and she lays back in the gurney.
I thought for sure I had watched her die, we all did. That peacefull look was just too strangely calm not to be staring into the face of angel. When we went back to the station I kept catching whiffs of that horrible smell, the GI blood. I found a splotch on my pants and went after it with alcohol wipes, trying to wash out the scent of death.
The next day my cell phone rang. Mike had talked to one of the doctors and found out that the woman hadn't only lived but was doing remarkably well for someone who lost nearly a third of their blood.
Maybe we got there just in time to get her to the hospital for a blood transfusion, by all laws and medical rules, she should have been dead. But for some reason the eighty some odd year old lady was thriving the last I heard.
That look, the look of utter peace and serenity is something that I will always remember. I'm certain she was looking down the tunnel, into the light. They say you often see the faces of loved ones and hear their voices when looking into that tunnel. Maybe some long lost relative of hers was smiling down on her soothingly, his voice gently telling her: "Not yet."
posted by Nick Stabile at 11:23 PM
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