Breakfast Delayed
He died when I was driving into work.
I can imagine the scene fairly easily, he'd been asleep in his nice warm water bed and just stopped being alive. He'd had throat cancer for years and still smoked. His wife slept in the other room and got up at around eight or so.
Back at the firehouse we were trying to decide on breakfast. Just as we settled on pancakes with fried egg in the middle--- some weird Canadian thing---- the tones go off for a cardiac arrest at the echo level.
I take a piss and we jump in the bus for the quick jog up the street.
She drags her husband off the bed, his already stiff body flops to the floor and she listens as 911 tells her how to pump his heart for him. The sweat beads on her forehead as she works to save a man who'd already been dead for a while.
We pull around a slow moving car and finally end up in front of the house. BT grabs the monitor and I take the first in bag. A guy in a trucker cap and a ratty t shirt holds the door open.
"WhereamIgoin'bud?" I ask like I always do on codes. He points me to a bedroom at the end of a cramped hallway. I hustle into see an overweight woman pressing on her emaciated husband's chest. The phone is cradled in her ear.
"Rescue's here now. Do you want to talk to them?" She asks 911. I hand her off to another firefighter who showed up and feel for a pulse.
Time of death 0835. Officially anyway, the poor guy had probably been dead for several hours as he was gray and stiff.
When I started in this line of work I used to get excited for codes, the CPR the monitor, the intubations and the drugs we push in order to try and bring the person back. Maybe I'm jaded or getting a bit burnt or maybe I'm realizing what my job trully is after nearly 7 years of doing it. Codes no longer excite me. Instead I think of the family members, the friends and the vacations untaken. The home projects unfinished. The mail unopened.
As a rule I don't like to bother the family members after I've decided not to comence efforts to resucitate their loved one. I usuaully snag a piece of mail and copy the address and such from that. Today it was an unopened letter from New Mexico.
Don't get me wrong, my job is great. I really couldn't do anything else but I think I'm getting a deeper understanding of where I fit into things and people's lives. Those people today will always remember me as the guy with his shirt untucked and a radio stuffed into his backpocket who felt their relative's neck and shook his head.
The medical examiner for our area is a frail guy so we went in service on scene and waited for him to show up. I zipped a vinyl body bag around someone's father and grunted and huffed as me and my partner tried to wrestle him out of the house. When we put him on the stretcher his lifeless head made a soft, dull thud as it touched the unpaded bed.
We abandon our plans for a Frog breakfast and settle on left over Creole chili from the shift before.
Now I sit here with Dropkick blaring.
I can imagine the scene fairly easily, he'd been asleep in his nice warm water bed and just stopped being alive. He'd had throat cancer for years and still smoked. His wife slept in the other room and got up at around eight or so.
Back at the firehouse we were trying to decide on breakfast. Just as we settled on pancakes with fried egg in the middle--- some weird Canadian thing---- the tones go off for a cardiac arrest at the echo level.
I take a piss and we jump in the bus for the quick jog up the street.
She drags her husband off the bed, his already stiff body flops to the floor and she listens as 911 tells her how to pump his heart for him. The sweat beads on her forehead as she works to save a man who'd already been dead for a while.
We pull around a slow moving car and finally end up in front of the house. BT grabs the monitor and I take the first in bag. A guy in a trucker cap and a ratty t shirt holds the door open.
"WhereamIgoin'bud?" I ask like I always do on codes. He points me to a bedroom at the end of a cramped hallway. I hustle into see an overweight woman pressing on her emaciated husband's chest. The phone is cradled in her ear.
"Rescue's here now. Do you want to talk to them?" She asks 911. I hand her off to another firefighter who showed up and feel for a pulse.
Time of death 0835. Officially anyway, the poor guy had probably been dead for several hours as he was gray and stiff.
When I started in this line of work I used to get excited for codes, the CPR the monitor, the intubations and the drugs we push in order to try and bring the person back. Maybe I'm jaded or getting a bit burnt or maybe I'm realizing what my job trully is after nearly 7 years of doing it. Codes no longer excite me. Instead I think of the family members, the friends and the vacations untaken. The home projects unfinished. The mail unopened.
As a rule I don't like to bother the family members after I've decided not to comence efforts to resucitate their loved one. I usuaully snag a piece of mail and copy the address and such from that. Today it was an unopened letter from New Mexico.
Don't get me wrong, my job is great. I really couldn't do anything else but I think I'm getting a deeper understanding of where I fit into things and people's lives. Those people today will always remember me as the guy with his shirt untucked and a radio stuffed into his backpocket who felt their relative's neck and shook his head.
The medical examiner for our area is a frail guy so we went in service on scene and waited for him to show up. I zipped a vinyl body bag around someone's father and grunted and huffed as me and my partner tried to wrestle him out of the house. When we put him on the stretcher his lifeless head made a soft, dull thud as it touched the unpaded bed.
We abandon our plans for a Frog breakfast and settle on left over Creole chili from the shift before.
Now I sit here with Dropkick blaring.
posted by Nick Stabile at 7:00 PM
2 Comments:
Feelin' your pain, bro....
I think I got to where you're at about 3 years ago - cardiac arrest over off of Cilley Rd. in Manchester on Memorial Day weekend. It seemed like no matter what we did everything went to hell really freaking fast. We emptied the drug box into the poor guy and shocked him into asystole every time we got v-fib. I remember shocking him 7 times during that call.
That said, I think of the "what-ifs" that the person would have had, pretty much like the ones you mention any time I go out on one.
Really good post.
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