A Thousand Naked Strangers (22 page)

The guy looks at us and asks if we've seen his cigarettes. “My dad didn't take 'em, did he?”

•  •  •

And so, yes. We killed someone. But then, with just as much ease, we brought him back to life. This is my first time. Up until this moment, every person I either found dead or who died in front of me has, despite my efforts, remained dead. This is Marty's
second. The first call he ever ran was a guy who dropped while jogging. Just collapsed and died, and Marty, with exactly zero experience, saved him. On his very first try. I realize now that when he said he didn't know anything, when he said he wouldn't be offended if I corrected him, he actually meant it. Because though he doesn't have much experience, he knows, deep down, he's good. The first thing he did on this job was bring the dead back to life. And now, having done it myself, I know just how that feels.

Word has spread, and by the end of our shift, people are talking about it. These people, the ones with more experience, who've been where we are—new and stupid and invincible—they tell us to take it in stride.
Yeah, you saved someone, and that's great,
they say,
but keep some perspective. Don't let it go to your head.

We nod and say that we'd never do such a thing, but fuck that. We. Are. Good. Coming to the realization of how much power we wield after so much second-guessing and self-doubt—it's intoxicating. Lives are in the balance, and it's just us. Making decisions, pulling the trigger, in control, no one to answer to. Marty has been on the fence about this job, and at times, so have I, but how much cooler can it get than this? The only other person with this much power is a doctor, and being a doctor means getting trapped in a hospital, being surrounded by registration clerks and air-conditioning repairmen and gift-shop teddy bears. We're out roaming the streets, surrounded by feral dogs and people who'd happily do us harm. We're gunslingers.

Though we should listen to the people who've been around, who've stood where we stand, we don't. We take this call to mean exactly what we want it to mean: that the only thing blocking
the door between this world and the next is us. Banish all doubt. Tonight and every night from here on out, lives will be saved or not depending on how good we are. We're young and stupid but confident, and we'll gladly tell you God's not dead. He's right here, running calls in the back of an ambulance.

W
e're
under siege. By the doctors and the fire department and the cops. Not merely outranked in the hospital but overlooked. In the streets we're outgunned, outpoliticked, out on our own. EMS—pulling up the rear in the meat wagon—always comes out on the losing end. But not us. Not anymore.

Marty and I have single-handedly raised the dead and vow, from this day on, that anyone not on this ambulance, not part of this two-man army, is an outsider. They don't understand what we're doing, they aren't operating at our frequency. It's us against the world, and so far as we can tell, we're right. You can't tell us a damn thing.

Our revolt starts immediately and all at once. Most of it, oddly, has nothing to do with patient care, and the little that does has to do with doctors. Those at the top of every food chain exercise their prerogatives, and for doctors, that includes holding everyone below them in at least mild contempt. There are any number of reasons, but somewhere on the list, in all likelihood, is that many doctors started out as nerdy kids who were laughed at and picked on and probably still are, outside of the hospital. Everyone experiences this at some point—being the odd man out—but some people never get over being slighted. Maybe
they internalize it, let it fester, until one day, years later, they're a doctor. And there, before them, are dozens of people who aren't. Suddenly, it's revenge of the nerds.

Marty and I get along with a few, but as a group, they're rude and dismissive, aloof to the point of arrogance. We've decided from now on, we'll simply ignore them. There's a handful of drugs and procedures we're allowed to administer only after calling the hospital and discussing it with a physician. We stop doing this. We just proved we know what we're doing, and we figure that if anyone comes around asking why we never bothered to get permission, we'll point to the patient's outcome, which we've already decided will be good. How could it not be? And since the patient will live, since we'll save him, what more can anyone say? How do you argue with the result when the result is a life saved?

•  •  •

That's how we're dealing with the doctors, but we're focused on more pressing matters, more righteous causes. Like pissing off the fire department.

Though we work together—same mission, same calls, same patients—for some reason, medics and firefighters can't get along. The fire guys consider us disorganized, rumpled, undisciplined, lazy, and jaded, while we look at them as dim-witted oafs who geek out on gear while giving poor patient care. In our opinion, they're best suited for the job of ferrying equipment to and from the ambulance. Sure, there are plenty of good firefighters out there, people I've worked with over the years whose arrival in the doorway tells me that things have just gotten easier. But there are others who can't flush a toilet without instructions.
As people, we get along, but as uniformed members of our respective departments, we generally do not. Yet we
have
to work together; we need each other. We exist as two halves of a strange whole, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in miniature. There is no relief—no way to extricate ourselves long enough to take a deep breath—and so it festers, and everything is a pissing match, a food fight, a shooting war.

Marty and I aren't the only ones. Every Grady medic has stories of firefighters who have bungled patient care or picked fights on-scene. For Marty and me, the issue boiled over at a swimming pool. We were dispatched to a possible drowning and arrived to find a seven-year-old boy on the deck of a public pool, dripping wet, blue, and not breathing. Fire arrived right after we did and must have seen us kneeling over the kid. Or maybe not. It's hard to imagine how they could have seen us, seen what was happening, and then walked away. Which is what they did. The captain grumbled something about this not being their call, and they turned and disappeared. Marty and I were left with the boy. We scooped him up, carried him to the ambulance, and started to ventilate him. After three puffs, the boy jerked upright and vomited a liter of warm stomach water all over Marty. We stood there in shock—with little chewed-up bits of hot dog swimming around the ambulance floor—as the boy gasped and looked around, as shocked as we were.

Though we'd saved him, we'd been abandoned. What if he hadn't started breathing again? What if his heart stopped and he was no longer a kid in need of air but a soon-to-be-dead child in need of CPR? A patient like that requires hands, which is exactly why the fire department is sent out with us. We did our best to raise hell, but the fire department is much more powerful, more
politically connected, than EMS, and the chiefs browbeat our supervisors into submission. So we began a low-grade war of retribution. If a call went out in a shopping mall, we'd go over the radio and tell the responding fire crew to enter from the north entrance—even though we were already kneeling over the patient at the south entrance. When they arrived, we'd shrug with surprise as they stomped up, out of breath, having gone half a mile out of their way. Then there was the sauerkraut. We bought a few pounds of it, and every day for a week, we brought it to the same fire station and overcooked it in the same microwave. After two or three days, when we walked in the door, someone saw us and asked what we were cooking. “Some Grady crew's been coming in here, burning sauerkraut,” the captain said. “You guys don't have anything like that, do you?” We shook our heads and darted into the kitchen, where Marty threw in the sauerkraut and set the timer to thirty minutes.

But things have changed. We've ascended to a new level. We're above pranking firemen. We're taking our contempt all the way up to the top. One afternoon we're sent to Atlanta Fire headquarters for a dispatcher with difficulty breathing. When we arrive, firefighters are already gathered around her. They have her on oxygen and albuterol and are preparing to give her an IV steroid—all common practices for someone having an asthma attack. Which isn't what is happening. As soon as we walk through the door, we realize the patient is hyperventilating and that the oxygen and the albuterol, not to mention the abrupt introduction of steroids, are only going to make things worse. We push our way in. We cut off the oxygen, yank off the mask. We pull the tourniquet off her arm before anyone can start an IV.

The firefighters are beyond shocked, beyond pissed. We just
plow ahead. Hyperventilation is pretty common, and generally, its cause is psychological. Sometimes a patient gets so pissed—at her husband, her boyfriend, her boss—that she loses her shit. Her breathing picks up until she's dizzy and her vision is starting to dim and her hands are cramping up. Now she can't stop hyperventilating if she wants to, and the situation gets worse and worse until she passes out. Unless someone can calm her. Which is what we do. We talk slowly, so softly that no one else can hear. Marty pushes the crowd of angry firefighters away as I get our patient to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth. “That's it. Just slow down. You're doing good.”

Eventually, she calms down and tells us she just had a fight with her daughter—another eighteen-year-old who's got nothing to learn from the world—and she lost it. She's better now, calm and quiet. We're ready to leave when the fire chief shows up. He's a big man, a full head of hair and a mustache, and he wants us to transport her. This man runs an entire fire department, has thirty years behind him and a couple thousand people below him. He's used to being obeyed. And here are two Grady medics. In his headquarters. Treating one of his employees. And they're looking him in the eye and saying no.

The guy goes through the roof. He's furious, yelling and pointing, making threats, making phone calls. And we couldn't give a damn. We're not firefighters. We're not city employees. We work for Grady; our responsibility is to the patient. Our patient is fine and doesn't want to be transported. We can hear him yelling as we walk out the door. Even as we hop in our ambulance and drive away, it doesn't feel like a coup or a victory. It's simply another call, another job well done. Another patient. We assume it's behind us. Except it isn't. But we don't learn that until later.

•  •  •

In the meantime, we take our fight to the police. Cops are a nation-state unto themselves, answerable to no one except the mayor, though sometimes they ignore her, too. Many cops operate under the assumption that we're there to whisk their troubles away. They believe that any time they have a person who's a nuisance but not a criminal, it's perfectly acceptable to call an ambulance and have their troubles carted off to Grady. Homeless guy sleeping on the street? Call Grady. Schizophrenic acting up at the Waffle House? Call Grady. Big violent guy who's naked and screaming at passing cars on Fulton Street? Call Grady. And when they do have someone in custody, after they've pepper-sprayed him or Tased him, or after he's been handcuffed and fallen really, really hard, they want us to come out and certify that he's healthy enough to be transported to jail. These are all minor annoyances, but they're everyday occurrences, and after a while they build up. Especially when you take into account how often we're called out to treat some cop's minor injuries.

Cops scratched on fences? Call Grady. Cops with bruised knees from a minor traffic accident? Call Grady. Cops who've wandered into their own cloud of pepper spray? Call Grady. One afternoon a cop shoots a dog that's bitten him, and we're beaten to the scene by a half-dozen other cops, a police chopper, and a news crew. We're given a police escort back to Grady—they block off every street we cross—where we're met by the head trauma surgeon. All for a cop bitten by a dog. And it's not even a bad bite.

No more. We decide that though we can't stop them from calling us, we'll no longer call them. For anything. Whatever
goes down, we can handle it. Shooting, stabbing, fight in progress? We're in. Kicking down doors, wrestling violent psychs, sedating pissed-off meth heads. We're invincible.

For a few months, Marty and I do it all. Everything goes fine until one day it doesn't. We're called out to Bowen Homes for a woman assaulted by her boyfriend. In a city full of housing projects, Bowen Homes is the worst. It's acre upon acre of two-story buildings that spring from the clay like brick mushrooms. It's thousands of people crammed together, the good, the bad, and the violent. It has its own library, its own medical clinic, its own school. Nobody ever sleeps, nobody ever leaves. People are everywhere, at all hours of the night, buying drugs, selling drugs, doing drugs. Some are trying to get by; others are trying to get over. There's noise and chaos, some low-grade ruckus, and
always
smoke drifting up from a hundred smoldering grills.

Marty and I pull in and drive to a dead-end street near the very back of the project. The projects are a beehive, so nothing goes unnoticed. People know what's happened the second it goes down, and as we pull in, people are waving and pointing, showing us the way. We're warned by dispatch that the scene is not safe, but that doesn't stop us. We arrive, get out, walk in, and find a woman beaten unconscious. We take a few minutes to assess her, then load her onto the stretcher and leave. The minute we open the door, all hell breaks loose. At least a hundred people have followed us here, and they're all crowded around the apartment, straining for a look. The girl's family is here, but her attacker is gone, so when they see her—unconscious, bleeding, limp—they have no one to focus their anger on. Except us.