left on the chopping block in her kitchen apologized for her departure from this world. The funeral was very hard to take. The secret knowledge of being at the scene of her death was a tremendous burden that I didn’t want to talk about. This made me feel incredibly out of place and I was only able to offer the briefest of condolences to the family because I feared breaking down.
This episode also made me realize the human drama that followed our handling of a body and how many lives are changed by the loss of one life. I had known this in theory, but had always been able to walk away from scenes and calls and forget them. Now I saw firsthand how Ryan and his family changed after Mrs. Collins’ body was bundled onto a stretcher. In the months that followed, I was constantly reminded of the call that changed my friend’s life. Ryan became very withdrawn and macabre. His friendships, including with me, soured. Eventually the family moved out of town, probably to get away from memories in their house and around town. What had been happy memories were now reminders of what had been lost. By that time, it was hard for me to go to Ryan’s house. The pictures of Mrs. Collins on the walls gave me flashbacks to the scene with her face-down in the grass.
One way that emergency personnel deal with a DOA is to see the ironic or humorous side of the scene. But I was completely unprepared for Mrs. Collins’ death and the gallows humor that resulted from Roger the cop being stabbed by a dead woman made me feel less than human. I really wish I could have helped Mrs. Collins.
Mrs. Collins death taught me that I had a great deal to learn, and there would be many ways to get that education. I was both an emergency services worker and a college student, and I wanted and needed to be good at both. Fortunately, there were opportunities where both of these interests could be addressed simultaneously. I was taking an anatomy class with the nursing students during the summer, for instance. It was being offered to professional students and was a chance for me to earn college credit while taking a class that would have been difficult to take during my regular chemistry curriculum. Anatomy is a hard class, because there is a lot of information (and some difficult concepts) to be assimilated and there is a great deal of memorization involved. There are hundreds of muscles in a human body and we had to learn them all, as well as where they connected to the bones, the nerves that controlled them and the actions they performed. These concepts were referred to as, “origin, insertion, action, and innervation.”
The 40 or so people in the class included nursing students, pre-med students, pre-dental students and me. It was an accelerated class and a lot of work, but my job gave me opportunities to see anatomy in action. A kid fell down some concrete steps onto some glass, for instance. There was a cut on his hand by his thumb, and he claimed he couldn’t feel or move it. We had learned in class about the nerves that control the hand and thumb. The recurrent branch of the median nerve is an important nerve to the hand that is in that area very close to the skin and I realized that he may have injured this nerve. While this injury was not life threatening, he did need a surgeon and firsthand observations like these helped me in anatomy class. One week we were learning about the cardiovascular system and perfusion to different organs. Each organ and tissue is continuously perfused by blood (that is, it has blood flowing through it) and that blood flow increases and decreases as demand changes. The skeletal muscles need more blood flow when we are exercising, the brain needs more blood during activity such as fast or complicated speech, the intestines need more blood flow after a meal and so on. We were given an essay assignment: “Choose your favorite organ and discuss its perfusion at rest and stimulated.” We had a week to finish the assignment and had to get our chosen tissues approved in advance. The next day the professor, Dr. Brenda Oaks, asked the class if anyone had decided on their organ yet. One person raised her hand. Dr. Oaks said, “OK, what organ do you want to discuss?”
“The penis,” replied the student. There were a few snickers, but not too many—we were paraprofessionals, and the mention of an organ of reproduction was not a big deal.
“OK,” said Dr. Oaks, “that is an interesting choice. That is actually a complicated discussion because of the multiple perfusion changes that occur when this organ is stimulated.”
“Really?” said the student, “I thought it was the simplest.” That brought a lot of laughter from the students. From the class a male voice called out, “Can I do the penis too? I have a fond attachment to that organ.” Dr. Oaks laughed at that.
I resolved to discuss a skeletal muscle in my essay but I did want to meet the student interested in penises. In the hospital café, I saw her in line for lunch. She looked a little like a young Mrs. Collins. I stepped up behind her and casually asked how her essay was going. “I was so embarrassed,” she said.
We chatted briefly and I learned that her name was Holly and she was a nursing student interested in working in the emergency room. I told her my story of ambulance work and college chemistry. She smiled, nodded and said that the ambulance sounded interesting and fun. I agreed and I knew that I would be seeing her again.
Before I went to work on the ambulance, I thought that hospitals would have fewer patients during the Christmas holidays. People were probably too caught up in family matters and shopping to go to the hos pital—the old “I have no time to be sick” mentality. Well, that is far from the way it is. Hospitals are loaded with patients around Christmas because of the stress caused by all of those extra things to do, family feuds and people being forced to break their normal routines. This leads to heart problems, psychological collapses and intestinal distress, all of which overflows into the hospitals. Hospital and emergency personnel are constantly busy with the sick and injured. We had our share of extra work, too. Between the fresh New York snow, all that Christmas cheer and playful kids home from school bringing up Mom’s blood pressure, there was a lot of business for the ambulance. Despite the hassles and pressures of it all, even the most grinchy emergency room person’s heart melted when a homeless guy stumbled in asking only to get warm. “Yeah, sure. Who do we bill?” would be the only question.
I was working the day shift on a crisp, clear and cold Christmas Day. My usual partner had requested the day off, so I was teamed with a guy named Warren McCain. We had never met before because it was Warren’s first day on the job. He was a bright young fellow with aspirations to join the Fire Department. The ambulance was a common avenue for getting into police and fire departments. The skills gained on the ambulance came in handy in both departments and we were always hiring because our turnover was so high.
We were doing the 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift this Christmas, so I spent the morning with my family. My brother Jim, a cop, had worked the midnight to 8 a.m. shift on Christmas Eve. That left us Christmas morning to celebrate. At 2 p.m., my brother went to sleep and I went to work. Everyone in my family seemed to be on the job. My brother-in-law was in the fire department and my mother was on the volunteer ambulance—a Jolly Volly.
Warren seemed to be a pretty smart guy, so I couldn’t understand how he got stuck doing Christmas Day. Jim Conner, the supervisor for our district, must have pressured the poor guy at the interview. “How did they talk you into doing this shift?” I asked when he arrived.
“When Jim said it was essential that I start on Christmas Day, I realized that they were probably stuck covering the shift. Why else would they hire me so quickly? So I moaned something about having to miss Christmas dinner, and how that was an important part of the holiday for me. Then I casually asked if the company would pay for Christmas dinner, and JC said, “yes.”
“Are you telling me we have tonight’s dinner on the company?”
“Yes!” said Warren with a smile.
“Excellent.” I smiled right back.
We started the shift confident that we were going to be fed well and reimbursed for it. The previous shift had been slow—not too many calls because everyone was opening gifts and preparing for the day’s big events. (Either that or they were too hung over to get out of bed.) But about noon it started getting very busy. The roads were jammed with cars full of people headed to see their friends and relatives. The parks were full of kids test-driving the latest in winter fun gear.