Lives

Sometimes I tend to think of my patients just as their ailment or where they're going. It sounds heartless but, in my new non emergent job, I sit back and just try and forget where I am. Nothing is happening to the patient, they just need me to take them somewhere. Most of the time they don't talk and they don't want you to talk. The fact that I was a firefighter is not interesting to them, all they want to is to get to their treatment.
But then, you get a guy like Bob. Bob was a firefighter for the navy for thirty years. He worked on aircraft carriers durring just about every major conflict of the twentieth century. He saw his friends burned to death when planes crashed, he fought fires in all seven seas and forty nine different countries.
One of his most compelling stories takes place in the Meditereanean. He was a young guy, about 24, working on a carrier. One of his friends was refueling a plane and as a firefighter, Bob had to supervise to make sure no sparks could set off an explosion. As it happened, the friend forgot to hook up a static line in order to prevent static electricity from igniting the fuel.
The fuel blew up right in front the gas man, covering him and turning him into a human torch. Bob jumped from his wing onto the other and kicked his friend onto the back of a waiting firefighter and prepared to jump off himself.
Because of the way airplanes fuel tanks are set up, the fire was sucked dirrectly into the fuel resovoir. A massive fireball erupted under Bob launching him fifty feet into the air and 200 feet down the runway.
For eighteen months, Bob lay in a vat of olive oil, nine of those months he was unconcious with trach tube allowing him to breathe. Now his body bears no trace of his injuries.
When Bob left the navy, he became an EMT Cardiac and worked in the district of Tiogue Rhode Island. He pulled people from burning cars, from underneath buses and stuck his fingers in a man's neck to prevent him from bleeding to death. He joined the State dive team and searched for drowning victims off the coast Narragansett. At one point his partner, decked out in a canvas deep sea suit with an old fashioned brass helmet was working under two hundreed feet of water, trying to salvage a crashed airplane. A jagged piece of metal tore open the diver's sleave and the resulting pressure blew the man's entire body into his helmet.
Bob and the other divers brought up the man's helmet and brought it to his wife. The helmet was buried in a funeral several days later.
Bob had an amazing life, he's been and done things that most people will only hear about in an adventure novel. Now he spends four hours a day hooked up to an electric kidney and suffers through the agonies of Chemo. He can't walk more than fifty or so feet at a time and even when he does his pace is slow and his gait stunted.
His only complaint is, "They don't let me drink any beer anymore. I just want a cold Miller, you know? With the ice still on the bottle." His forearm still has the anchor and now unintelligble words from his navy days.
I once told Bob that listening to his stories make me feel lazy. He looked at me for a minute and then said, "Everyone has to start somewhere. You were a firefighter in Worcester, right? Well, you'll get on again and then you'll have stories of your own. You won't be doing these bullshit granny runs forever." Then he starts to talk about the latest Harry Potter book.
As I have told many people, Bob is the man.
Bob is one of my inspirations, as I work to make money for the life I want. I know that I will get hired again and that I will have a great life with Colleen, my other inspiration.