A Fitting End

My first night at New England Ambulance was nearly two years ago. I worked a 2000 to 0800 and never set foot in headquarters because it was so busy. We ran all night doing emotional disturbed person removals, difficulty breathing out of the projects, chest pain calls from a dinky little private residence in Cranston and finally several trip and falls at local nursing homes.
Lately my over nights (all I work at NEA) were not so bad, there were some nights where we got our asses handed to us but overall they weren't horrible. I worked with some great people, made a lot of good friends and, despite being on a private in RI, got to use my skills for something other than non emergent dialysis related paperwork.
But Thursday's 2000 to 0800 tour was the last I will work at New England, I've taken a position with Fallon EMS up in Boston and once my medic ticket comes through I will be moving up there. Fallon provides 911 for six communities as well as tactical medical support for the Law Enforcement Consortium and serves as the Incident Response Group for the Boston Metro area.
And so my tenure at New England has come to a close. New England got me my first code, way up in the rafters high above the ice at Disney on Ice. I had countless memorable experiences such as when the psych patient tried to jump out the back door of my bus on 95 and when I watched a coherent, non emergent patient slump into unconciousness and had to figgure out what the hell was going on.
So its around 1130 and I'm sweating my ass off. Its humid as hell and I'm holding a 17 year old girl's head in my hands.
"Wake up, open your eyes." I yell in her face as foam bubbles up from her lips. "Jesus, what did you people take tonight?" I ask her wide eyed girl friends, scantilly clad teenagers out for a night at the clubs. They nervously tell us that she didn't have anything more than a few drinks.
"Open your eyes, ah shit." She starts convulsing and my partner, a four foot something girl who looks about 18 but is really 37 says: "Fuck it, lets go."
And so, with a Johnson and Wales University cop helping us push the stretcher, we run through throngs of college students who simply refuse to move so I start shouting. "Move it, get the fuck outta the way." Because I'm classy like that.
In the back of the truck she's bouncing and shaking so I just let her do her thing while I get an IV set up, bleed the line and everything. My partner is already drawing up the Narcan, a narcotic antagonist that litterally acts as instant detox. The girl is seizing so hard I have to climb on the stretcher and use my knee to keep her arm still so I can pop an IV in her hand. Despite her jittering movements and the foam spewing from her mouth, I manage to weasel an 18, smaller than I would have liked but o well, into her left hand. We hit her with .4 of Narcan and the goofy little dance stops, she spits a massive gob of phlegm all over the back window of the truck before letting go a torrent of vommit.
Then, very lucidly she asks. "What happened?"
I give the vommit covering my truck a disdainful look as my partner says. "What did you take tonight?"
Confused, the girl sputters. "Two rum and cokes but then we left because I didn't feel good, one of the drinks made me feel funny so we got going."
Instantly the over protective old fashion Irishman in my starts getting ornery and acting up. "Listen dear, did you go anywhere alone with any guys tonight?" I can feel myself getting pissed off. She's a good looking girl, young and you can tell some creepy show lounge lizzard with a pit of Special K or whatever would love to get in her pants.
"No, my friends were really good when I got sick we just left." I let out a sigh as she starts to decomp again, head lolling back into another seizure as the Narcan wears off.
"Look, I'm gonna get us to Trauma," I tell Kyle, my partner. "Push another four or so in route, but slowly, I already gotta clean this shit up."
RIH is the usual shit show of drunks and stabbing victims. We drop off little Miss Almost Date Rape and I set about cleaning my truck.
The rest of the night has us pulling fat old people in various states of extremis out of nursing homes, we took one Mexican lady out of the projects for a diabetic emergency. At around three o clock I finally fall into bed only to be woken up for a call to Kenedy Plaza in downton Providence. Johnson and Wales cops are on scene with a white rapper gangsta wannabe who is covered in blood and had all the meat on his left arm torn off. He's also drunk off his ass and threatening to hurt us.
I tell him to sit down and shut up and I bandage his arm while the JWU cops just take off. He smears his blood all over the walls of my truck while telling me that I am a blue collar stiff and he doesn't have to listen to me. Its too early in the morning for me to be nice so I counter with. "Listen fuckface, your mom and dad are paying ungodly amounts of money for you to go to school and you're wasting their time and money. In short, you suck. Now shut the hell up before I stick you with a big ass needle."
He bitches, he moans, he refuses to give us any information so I strap him down and BLS his dumbass to Trauma. Once there, I give him to the nurses, clean his nasty blood out of my truck and fall asleep in the EMS refreshment room.
All in all, a fitting end to my tenure at NEA. I worked with my favorite partner of all time there and I had some fun little calls where I got to play with IVs and drunk people. IVs and drunk people are always a good time.