So, I got to ride on an AMBULANCE last nite! And, I wasn't bleeding!
Alright, I have to tell you real quick about this thought I kept having last nite while on the ambulance. I could NOT stop thinking about 28 Days Later for some reason. In a way, it was pretty fitting. I mean, when you're riding an ambulance, you don't even notice the people who aren't bleeding, choking, or dying. It's a really strange way to look at the world for 12 hours. It's like I stopped seeing all the people who had absolutely nothing wrong with them, like they vanished off the face of the Earth. The only ones I saw were people in varied proximity to death. The similarity to 28 Days Later was pretty apparent to me after about the 1st hour. My little fantasy probably wasn't helped at all when my partners for the nite introduced themselves as Mark and Selena, which are the exact same names of those two survivors Jim meets in London during the first 20 minutes of 28 Days Later. Weird, but cool.
So, I guess I'll run down the list of calls we went on:
1) We left the MEDIC station at about 5P, and headed toward University Hospital, until we came across this big group of cops who'd recently arrested a few people at the IHOP across Harris Blvd from the hospital. When we drove past, a cop flagged us down, and told us we needed to stop and help a cop. My first thought was that we were about to treat a stabbing victim, or maybe even a gunshot. I'd really hate for that to happen to a cop, but it would have definitely been an awesome way to start the evening. Well, instead, we got to lay a cop down on the stretcher in our air-conditioned ambulance, place a few cool-packs in strategic places, and basically wait there until he cooled off. He told us a pretty good story about the arrest they'd just made, and he left us just about 10 minutes after it all started. We drove on to a fire house, where we waited until the next call.
2) After watching half an episode of Seinfeld, we were called to respond to a man suffering from heatstroke at a hotel. We made it within a block of the building, and the CFD (Charlotte Fire Department) dispatch told us we weren't really needed. I'm not really sure why, but we just turned around and headed back toward the fire house.
3) Well, on the way back to the fire house, we got a call to respond to a woman complaining of abdominal pain at another hotel. We showed up on scene, and this really shady hotel, and picked up a woman who was complaining of a sharp pain in her lower right abdomen. It smelled like she'd been drinking for years, and she was pretty rowdy. She put together one of the most interesting string of curse words I've ever heard: "You are a mother-shitting, asshole-licking cunt, Red." I found that whole thing really funny, because I'd said nothing even remotely brash to this woman during the time we rode to Presbyterian, and I held her hand the whole way there. When she was being wheeled away, she looked at me and said it with the tone of voice you might imagine a repentent murderer on death row would use bidding a final, heartfelt farewell to the loving spouse that had stood by them until their very last moments. And, after spewing that toxic mix of words my way, she added on an endearing little nickname at the end when she addressed me as "Red". I don't really know what was wrong with that lady, but it was certainly no small thing.
4) After heading to a MEDIC station off I-85, we waited for about 45 minutes until we got a call to respond to a natural gas leak at the Government Center, which is where Mayor McCrory's office is. Well, there were a million.75 fire trucks there when we arrived on scene. It turned out that the leak was just isolated to two floors, and it wasn't really even that big a deal. We stayed on scene for about 45 minutes, and then went to another fire house.
5) This fire house seemed like it was right at the base of the Hearst Tower, which was a really awesome place to chill out for a little while. Well, we got a call to respond to Johnson C. Smith University, where we were supposed to help a few people who had passed out on the football field during an evening band practice. We arrived, and we picked up a young guy who was suffering from a pretty bad asthma attack. We hooked him up to some oxygen, gave him the appropriate medication, and brought him to Mercy. After we left him at the hospital, that's pretty much when the fun stopped.
6) I guess it was just our bad luck, but we were told to drive all the way out to a fire house in Pineville. We waited there for about 2 hours, and got a call to respond to a "fall with injury". We arrived on scene, and there was an 80 yr-old woman who had fallen out of her bed, and went into cardiac arrest. I was the last one in the door, after my partners and a few firemen. I came in just time to see the firemen bringing the woman into the foyer to start performing CPR. From the very beginning, it was pretty obvious that this woman couldn't have been resuscitated. After 2 cycles of CPR, a family member produced a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order, and the work stopped. We waited until we could transfer custody of the body to a police officer, and we went back to the fire house in Pineville. We waited for a couple of hours, until we received permission to end our shift and go home at 5A.
All in all, it was pretty surreal experience. I can't say I've ever done anything like that in my life, and I'm pretty sure that an opportunity like that will come along rarely, if ever again. I'm glad I did it, not only because I can pass the class now, but also because I think there was an important lesson to be learned about life. There exists a special group of people who will do anything within their power to save the lives of those people in need of saving, without discrimination, and we could all go a bit farther in following their example.
