And baby makes two (or three, or maybe four, who knows?)

As much death as we see in this business, when we can witness new life it’s especially sweet.  Some medics can spend a career and never assist in a delivery; I however have helped bring five babies into the world and last shift that number went to six. 

We were dispatched to the Prynne residence for a lady in labor.  When we got there it was clear; this baby was coming and it was coming now!  The mom, a lady named Hester, seemed unusually calm for someone about to deliver a baby on a kitchen table.  The dad was a different story.  He was a wreck.  Nevertheless, he dutifully stood there holding Hester’s hand the whole time.  The delivery went really smoothly and after the baby was out I asked the dad if he wanted to cut the cord.  The look on his face was one I’d never seen before.  Hester piped up and said, “Oh, no.  He’s not the father!  This..this is Rev. Dimmesdale, my church pastor.  Cheese and I looked at each other.  This guy must be the most saintly person in the world to stay by the side of a congregant through such an intimate time.  Or, there’s something going on they’re not telling us.  After working the gutters for a few years you gain a sixth sense and I got the sense that this guy wasn’t her pastor, and if he was he had more involvement with Hester than he probably should have.  But that was none of my business, and besides I have seen much more twisted and perverted things in my time. 

I got the new, beautiful baby girl all cleaned up and handed her to Hester.  I asked her if she had a name picked out, and she had.  Hester said, “Her name’s Pearl, because she came a great price” all while looking at the good Reverend.  If I hadn’t had any doubts that there was more to the story than that, they were now gone!  We eventually got Hester and Pearl delivered to hospital.  Afterwards, as I’m filling out the paperwork, I see in Hester’s chart that her marital status is listed as married.  I wondered to myself where her husband was.  Then I thought again, I really, really don’t want to know.       

Was it murder?

One of the good parts about this job is that we only work ten days a month.  One of the bad things is that they only pay us peanuts.  So as a result, almost every one of us has a second (and sometimes third) job.  Most of us work at the hospital or in security.  My pal Scotty from A shift happens to help out down at the morgue.  We were supposed to play basketball last night after he got off work.  He texted me and asked me if I could pick him up there; there was something he wanted me to see.

“Did you see on the news about that evangelist that died over the weekend?” Scotty asked when I got there.  I had.  There had been a revival group meeting down in the city square for the last week at a pavilion they call The Scaffold.  Sunday night, a preacher by the name of Arthur Dimmesdale stood up and instead of giving a sermon he confessed to a relationship with a married woman and fathering a child with her.  He then promptly fell over and died right there.  His body was now at the morgue and Scotty had helped with his autopsy.  I asked Scotty if they had a cause of death.  They didn’t, nothing had turned up in the exam.  But he did have a theory.  Scotty asked me if I had ever heard of SLUDGE?  I had.  It’s a constellation of signs and symptoms we see in certain cases of poisonings and this guy fit the bill.  To boot, his roommate was this MD named Chillingworth.  Who else would have had known how to poison someone and not get caught?  They were still waiting on toxicology reports to come back, but Scotty was putting his money down that the guy had been poisoned.  But that’s not why he wanted to see me.  We went back into the cold room and Scotty said that he wanted my opinion on something.  He pulled Dimmesdale’s body out and asked me what I thought about this, pointing to a red mark on his chest.  To me it looked just like the letter A.  He agreed but everyone at the morgue had a theory about how it got there.  One pathologist thought it was just a birth mark, one thought it had been burned or branded into his flesh.  Too me it looked like it had been cut into an A with a knife.  Whatever it was, it was weird.   Scotty rolled him over and asked me to look at his back too.  There on his back were multiple “scars” for lack of a better word.  We both looked at them for a minute trying to figure out what they were.  They almost looked like puncture wounds, perhaps he was into self-mutilation, or maybe his poisoner did it.  Either way this was a weird case.  All I could think of is “Great!”.  Now I’m going to be stuck rolling this over in my mind for days.  That’s what I do, I think about this.  I’m anxious to hear back about his toxicology report.  This is almost worthy of novel.  A man of God, an improper relationship, possibly murder.  Maybe someone should write one.  It probably would be pretty good.       

150 years later and we still have slavery

Many healthcare workers, us included, take the same Hippocratic Oath that physicians take: First do no harm.  That’s usually pretty easy to do.  We get into this business to help people so putting them ahead of ourselves is just what we do.  However, there a handful of patients who test my limits.  There are those handfuls of evil people walking the face of the earth that make you question whether they even deserve to breath the same air as us.  Last shift I found myself staring at one of them. And for the first time, I considered killing a patient.

Earlier in the week we and several other units were called to a nice looking ranch house in Parkview Meadows, a really nice neighborhood.  Earlier in the day, the police had picked up a girl who claimed she had been imprisoned and enslaved by a man named Legree for the last two years and somehow she had managed to escape.  She told them that he was also holding more than a dozen other girls in the house as sex slaves.  The cops raided the house and indeed found 13 other young girls of various nationalities.  They also found three young boys there too that the girl they picked up didn’t even know about.  They called us to transport them all to the hospital for treatment.  They were all malnourished.  Many of them had been beaten.  The two girls that Cheese and I transported were the most pitiful sight I had ever seen.  When we got them to the ER they didn’t want me to leave.  Both were clinging on my arm begging me not to leave.  I couldn’t understand much of what they were saying but I did understand, “You strong, big, protect us, please, please.”  It brought tears to my eyes to leave them there but we had other calls waiting I had to leave.  I did run into one of the officers that we had seen at the house later that night and I asked him if they had found this slim ball Legree that was pimping out these girls and boys as sex slaves.  He said that there was a massive manhunt for him and the figured they’d find him soon.  They did in fact find him three days later, and I happened to be part of it.

The very next shift, the cops finally found him and in the process of taking him into custody he had to be Tazered and we were called to take him to the hospital. (After a guy died after being Tazered last year the police decided that in the future anyone they lit up had to be checked).  As were taking him in I can’t even look at this guy.  I’m can’t imagine how anyone could own another human being.  What’s worse than that was the thought of how many times these kids were raped either by his hands or someone he pimped them out to.  It just made my blood boil.  Then he pulled the punch that broke the camel’s back!  He looked at me and said, “They’ll never convict or punish me.  Do seriously think they’ll take the word of those (expletive)’s over a man of my stature.  Never going to happen!”  That really blew me up.  After what he had done and then to be to callous and cavalier about it, for the first time in my life I considered killing another person.  How easy would it be to draw up a syringe full just the right cocktail and end him right there?  Too easy….and too easy for him.  He didn’t deserve death.  He deserved to rot in prison for the rest of his life and let the other inmates deal with him by their convict code.  So I decided not to do it.  We took him to a different hospital than the kids had been taken too, some of them were still admitted there and we didn’t want him anywhere near them. 

I did get a chance to go back and see the two girls that we had transported from that house.  I brought them each a teddy bear which they loved.  I hope they can move on with their lives, and I hope I never have to witness the fallout from sex slavery ever again!       

Death by ambivalence???

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, it’s been a really busy and crazy fall.  Life at work has been just as crazy.  I had another kid die on me back at Halloween in an accident.  That made three for the year.  Death is just part of the job that we accept, but kids…kids are different. So I took a couple of weeks’ of much needed vacation off to get my head back on straight.  I had hoped my first shift back would be relatively quiet.  I was wrong.

We get a lot of frequent flyers in this job; people we transport on what seem like a regular basis, some good, some bad.  There’s Mrs. Sugarman the diabetic lady. We get called to her house at least once a month, but nobody seems to mind because she’s as sweet as her name and she has no family so we’re the closest thing she has sometimes.  Then there’s people like Agnes that lives in one of $29 a night motels.  We get the pleasure of seeing her at least twice a month.  She’s not nearly as sweet.  We don’t always pick up our frequent flyers in the same place.  Like last shift, we took a guy out of the jail that we recognized as soon as we saw him; it was the “Prefer not to guy” from the business district.

We were called to the jail to transport an unconscious guy, by the name of Bartelby, who had reportedly not eaten in days.  The jail nurse said their shrink saw him and said that he wasn’t on a hunger strike, protest, or even in a deep depression; he just preferred not to (eat).  Cheese and I had encountered this guy twice before.  We were called to a law office downtown a couple of months ago.  The owner of the firm called us because he thought one of his law clerks was having a psychotic break.  It seems the guy moved himself into the office and had ceased to do any work at all.  When we examined the guy, everything checked out.  The only thing was that he answered most questions by saying, “I’d prefer not too”.  Since he was medically stable and no threat to himself we left him there much to the dismay of this attorney.  Fast forward a couple of weeks and Cheese and I are back at this same office.  This time the attorney had moved out, but Mr. Prefer Not Too decided to stay.  When the new tenants moved in they called again thinking this guy was suffering some type of psychological issue.  Once again he checked out and we left.  I did tell the new tenants that they always had the option of calling the police and having him forcefully removed if they wanted to.  I guess they took me up on the advice because here he is now in the jail.  Since he was unconscious we transported him this time to the hospital.  After some IV fluids on the way in he actually was awake by the time we got to the ER.  When we left, I secretly hoped we’d not ever see him again, and sadly I got my wish.  We were back in the ER later that night and I asked one of the nurses what they ended up doing with Bartelby.  She told me he had died about an hour ago.  I guess he had remained lucid enough to talk to one of the hospital shrinks while he was there and they ruled out any psych issues.  It seems that he just “preferred not too”.  So I asked, “You’re telling me this guy died of ambivalence?”  She agreed.  Mark your history books folks!  The first every case of death by ambivalence occurred right here.  Shake my head…I need to go back on vacation!     

Not the way I pictured meeting someone famous...

Boy, I’m glad that’s over; one last night working in the gutter.  I had hoped that this last shift would be relatively quiet.  I was wrong. These 24 hour shifts aren’t what they used to be.  I used to love only working 10 days a month, but the 24 on 24 off, 24 on 24 off, 24 on three days off are really wearing on me.  I’m not in my twenties anymore.  I am so looking forward to my three-day. 

Despite the tedium of all the sick little kids and the little old ladies that fell down, there was one bright spot that came out of last shift: I got to meet someone famous! Well, sort of anyway.   When we got toned out around 3:00 AM, Cheese and I were at 7-11, enjoying Slurpee’s and scratching lottery tickets (isn’t that what everyone does at 3:00 AM?).  The police needed assistance with an unknown medical call at the Triple-H.     Ah, the Triple-H!  It’s an alley off the Boulevard that we, the police, and often the coroner are often called to, so named because the only ones who hang out there are those that are high, those that are homeless, and those that are employed in the world’s oldest profession.  When we pulled up, one of the cops met us at the curb shaking his head.  This can’t be good.  “You’ll never believe this”, he said.  “We got a guy back there passed out and his ID says that he’s Edgar Poe.  Isn’t he like a writer or something?”  A writer or something!  Without Edgar Allan Poe, there’d be no Stephen King.  This I’ve got to see. 

We back into the alley and find this guy sprawled out on the pavement. He’s barely conscious.  The only way I can tell is the fact that he’s mumbling something that I can quite make out.  As I get closer I’m almost overtaken with the smell of alcohol.  His guy’s really plastered.  He’s filthy, his clothes are disheveled, and his shoes are falling apart.  How can this be one of the most famous writers in American history?  He looks like he’s homeless!  So we get him loaded up and into the back of the truck.  As Cheese is trying to get his clothes his clothes off, I noticed that they are at least three sizes too big. Those can’t be his clothes.  What in the world is someone as famous as him doing passed out in the Triple-H, three sheets to the wind and wearing someone else’s clothes?  This just doesn’t make since.  So, anyway, we got an IV in him, started him on some fluids, gave him some thiamine and D50 hoping to get him sobered up a faster.  As I’m examining him, I see that his pupils are just little pinpoints, the tell-tale sign of an opiate overdose.  I gave him some Narcan, the overdose wonder drug, and surprise, surprise he starts waking up some more.  In addition to all the booze he’s had, he’s probably high on Laudanum; that stuff’s cheap and easy to get, the scourge of the times.  Now that he’s a little more alert I can finally make out what he’s been mumbling all along.  He’s calling out, “Reynolds! Reynolds!”  Who the heck is Reynolds?  Anyways, we got him transported to the ER at Washington Hospital.  When I told the nurses who he was, no one could believe it!  The news spread quickly throughout the hospital, and soon there was a line of orderlies, nurses and doctors all trying to get a glimpse of the “train wreck” that was Edgar Allan Poe.

We didn’t stick around at the ER too long; after all I still needed to drink my Slurpee before it all melted, and those lottery tickets weren’t going to scratch themselves.  Surprisingly, we didn’t have any more calls the rest of the shift.  Good thing because this rotation has been exhausting.  On my way home I just kept thinking, how could someone so famous and highly regarded end up like a piece of crumpled trash thrown in the gutter?  It just doesn’t make sense.  Maybe they’ll find out more once he wakes up.  I’ll try swinging by the hospital later and see what they found out. 

I’m so glad to be on my three day.  With that in mind, I probably won’t be posting for a few days while I attempt to wash this filth from my mind, the side effect of working the gutters.  If I find any more about Poe, I’ll see if I can’t update you all.  Till next time…

The Pestilence Infecting the Gutter

The one good thing about working in The Gutter is that it makes you appreciate your own home and neighborhood so much more.  This place is like a wasteland.  The poverty, the rampant drug use, the dealing, the daily acts of violence; they’re like a plague infecting the whole neighborhood, and it seems as if there’s no cure.  The whole area is blighted…except for Prospero’s.    Some says that he’s an eccentric guy trying to revitalize the neighborhood, but this isn’t gentrification.  It’s just a kingpin setting up a compound for him and his posse, and everyone knows it.  Prospero came in two years ago, leveled an entire block, built a lavish mansion and surrounded it by a ten foot high fence, with a gated entrance and “security” on hand.  Everyone had hoped that he might share some of his wealth and help the neighborhood, but the fact is that he could care less.  Truth be told; he’s the one responsible for ruining the area.  This used to be a really nice area filled with decent, hardworking, blue collar families.  Then the 80’s hit and Prospero seeing a market moved in and started peddling his crack.  It all has been downhill from there.  If you ever wanted to find out how the plague started, look no further than him.  He’s the one that brought the drugs, the violence, and all the pestilence into the neighborhood.  And now, he’s living it up, right in front of everyone else who’s suffering.  He could have built anywhere.  Why here? 

 I’ve heard that Prospero throws some wild parties over there, ones that last for days.  I’ve often said that it would only be a matter of time before we got called out to there, and last night, my prophesy came true!  It was after midnight when we got toned out for a shooting, and when we heard the address we knew exactly where it was.  We waited outside for the cops to clear the scene and declare it safe.  When they let us in I was not prepared for what we found.  Prospero and over half a dozen of his crew lying dead on the floor, each shot execution style.  All I could think was just how, no matter how rich he was, no matter how high the walls were, no matter how much security he had, he wasn’t immune to the pestilence he created.  The very violence that made him the kingpin, the millionaire that he was, had arrived and visited upon his own house!  Call it irony, call it karma, call it what you will; Prospero, in the end, got his just desserts.  Cheese and I methodically checked each body; confirming the absence of vital signs and unofficially declaring them all dead.    I’ve seen enough carnage in my years working the streets, but I’ve never saw ten people lying dead all at once.  Oh boy, I hope can sleep after this, but I doubt I will. 

I asked one of the cops if they had any idea who might have done this.  He seemed baffled, and…shocked.  This place is locked up tighter than Fort Knox.  How could anyone have even gotten in here, let alone made a getaway.  He said that so far they’d found no usable forensic evidence, no shell casings, and no witnesses.  The only thing they found so far was a Halloween mask lying on the floor.  It was dark, red, grotesque, and spattered with blood.  It wasn’t much, but perhaps it was a start.  Cheese and I decided to wait for the Coroner outside; I didn’t need any more of those images in my head.  As soon as the he arrived, I gave him a quick report and we left.  This is why I hate “Poe”ville Heights! 

Two down, one more shift to go.  I knew this rotation was going to be bad, but I never dreamed it would be like this.  My three-day can’t get here quick enough!  I’ll talk to you again in a couple of days.  Till then…..

One for the birds.....

 

So, it’s one down, two more to go in this wretched rotation.  Yesterday’s shift was pretty busy.  We ran ten calls by 11:00 PM; sick kids, little old ladies that fell down, so on and so on.  I had hoped to lie down in the bunk room and get a little bit of sleep.  No such luck!  The tones went off again shortly after midnight for a possible psych patient.  Here we go!

As we roll up on the house, Cheese and I look at each other; we’ve been here before.  It was for that that really pretty lady we found dead a couple of months before.  What was her name?  Nora?  Lori?  Lenore, that’s it!  We found her in bed with an empty bottle of Laudanum on the night stand.  Cheese thought it was an accidental overdose, I thought it might be a suicide.  Either way, it was a sad situation.  And her boyfriend, boy that guy was squirrelly.

We get inside and find Lenore’s boyfriend talking with the cops.  I guess the neighbors had called after they heard a loud argument coming from his place.  When the cops arrived, they found him in a heated argument with…no one!  The guy claimed that a raven let itself in through the window and the two of them struck up a conversation.  Now, talking with a bird isn’t exactly normal, but the weird part was…there was no bird.  The guy was arguing with a statue-thingy on the wall.  The cops were concerned about his welfare so they wanted us to check him out.

I started talking with the guy and he’s going on and on about this bird and how it’s liar because, “Lenore IS in heaven!”  I asked him what exactly the bird said and in a pretty awesome bird voice he said, “Nevermore!  Nevermore!”  I talked with him some more and he’s adamant, he doesn’t want to go to the hospital.  He’s oriented and pretty lucid.  He’s not suicidal.  He doesn’t appear to be a threat to anyone else.  His vital signs are stable.  He doesn’t appear to have a head injury. Other than arguing with a non-existent bird, he’s in pretty darn good shape!  Even though I’m sure that we’re going to be back out here again later on that night, I told the cops that we couldn’t make him go into the hospital with us. 

So we just left him there, hoping he and the raven could sort this one out on their own.   As we’re walking out Cheese and I just shook our heads; just another ordinary night in the gutter! 

I guess it’s time for me to lie down and try to get some sleep and forget about all this craziness.  I’ll check back in with you guys in a couple of days.  Till then…