Thursday Night Shift

Thanks for coming in on such short notice. That’s Ambulance 131. We’ll be driving that. You can tell it’s 131 because there's a dent in the front from when we ran over Nick. Over there is the supervisor’s office. That’s where Ben usually sits on his ass while we do the actual work. Just leave your immunization records on his desk. That’s the work schedule. I still need to take Jeff’s name off Thursday nights. Remind me to do that at the end of our shift.

We have … 26 minutes before we need to call in. Let me show you the front of 131.

This is the radio, the fun one. The driver gets to control the music, no matter how terrible their taste is. Jeff likes to switch it to the Christian rock station. To be honest, I really didn’t like the guy at first. The Christmas shift was actually my first time working with him. Nobody told you about Christmas? Well, there’s this department tradition of making the new guys drink a gallon of spiked eggnog at the annual holiday party. And I wanted to make a good first impression y’know? So I chugged three. I was still violently hungover when I showed up to the Christmas night shift, and Jeff blasting Christian rock didn’t help. And neither did the nauseating amounts of hair gel he slathered on his bald head. If you look there above the driver’s seat, there’s a stain where what’s left of his hair brushed against the ceiling.

This is the other radio, the less fun one. Channel 1 is dispatch, channel 2 is fire, channel 3 is animal control. Everything you say over the radio is recorded and potentially reportable, so be nice to the dispatcher. That’s the only thing I did right on Christmas. The dispatcher said

“Ambulance 131, eight-year-old female, altered consciousness.” I responded, “131 en route.

Thank you, ma’am.” Very gentleman-like. If I ever accidentally leave the mic on when I’m talking shit, she’s going to remember that “thank you”.

This button is for the lights. That one’s for the siren. These are the walkies. Keep yours charged and do not forget it—that’s the first thing I did wrong. I brought gloves, I grabbed the trauma bag, and I forgot my damn walkie. I got distracted by an old woman shouting at us from the front door. She was the one who made the call. If you go online, you can still find the audio from the 911 call. She’s on the phone sobbing. I mean, like crying so hard it sounds like she’s choking. She goes, “Our baby girl! Something is wrong with our baby girl!” When I met her at the door, I get this terrible feeling in my chest and I’m hit with a wave of nausea. At the time, I thought it was just my hangover. Jeff tried asking the regular questions, but the woman was incoherent. She just muttered something and pointed upstairs.

Weird, right?

So of course, Jeff bolts upstairs no-questions-asked, like an idiot. And I stumble in behind him like an even bigger idiot. When I get to the top of the stairs, I try to act like I’m not winded. While I’m catching my breath, I see Jeff staring into the bedroom, totally quiet. It’s to my side, so I can’t see what’s in there, but I hear someone crying. I’m scared to look. I’m already struggling to choke back vomit and I have a feeling that what's in there won’t help. Then I feel a wrinkly hand on my shoulder and the room stops spinning. The old woman gestures that she has something to give me. She says, “If she’s going to die, give her this.”

I look down, and it's a brownie with little candies on top. You know, the Little Debbie ones? I say, “Of course.” and stuff it in a random compartment in the bag.

I hear Jeff’s boots against the hardwood as he walks into the room, and I finally muster up the courage to take a peek. It looked kind of like those Christmas scenes where everyone is gathered around baby Jesus. There is a man and a woman. They’re crouched on the floor with wet cheeks and swollen eyes. And between them is a doggie bed …with a dog. A golden retriever. And she’s wagging her tail and looking around all confused. She’s laying on her back with her paws up.

I was getting pissed off at that point, but I kept my mouth shut. People prefer when only one EMT is asking the questions so I figured I’d let Jeff ask where the hell our patient was. But he stays silent while my eyes burn holes in the back of his smooth head. He takes a step towards the dog bed and kneels down to read the dog's collar.

He looks the dog in her eyes and says, “Don’t worry, Babygirl, we’ll take good care of you.”

The man says, “Please help. We don’t know why she’s acting like this.”

I muster up the courage to speak. I say, “That’s a boy dog.”

Jeff asks, “When did she start acting strange?”

The man says, “I don’t know… She was fine this morning. My poor Babygirl…”

I say, “That’s definitely a boy dog.”

I feel like nobody's listening to me. Babygirl finally notices me standing in the doorway. She matches my gaze with her sickly eyes, and the room starts spinning faster than ever. I’m thinking, there is something horribly wrong with this dog. So I start vigorously digging through the trauma bag for something that can fix her. The last thing I remember before I passed out was covering the wood floor with the eggnog that had been curdling in my stomach.

See this little orange button on the side of the walkie? If you’re in trouble, hold this for 3 seconds. Jeff didn’t forget his walkie, and he had enough sense left in him to push it. Everyone got out safe, even the dog. But Ben never lets me hear the end of it. The fire department came and discovered the defective fireplace that had been filling the house with fumes. And I don’t know what Babygirl did, but we haven’t had a normal Thursday night since.

That’s it for the front of the truck.

This is the back. That little gray thing on the side of the trauma bag is a carbon monoxide detector. I used to take it out and wave it around every time we had a strange interaction with an animal, but at this point I don’t bother. After that first Thursday Jeff and I started adapting. Even though we still mainly deal with people, it’s important we’re prepared for anything. Restocking is important for any ambulance, but especially 131. You know how many EpiPens it takes to get a cow out of anaphylaxis? 131 should always be the best stocked ambulance here.

I keep an extra pack of cigs in the trauma bag. Most guys here smoke. Don’t smoke them back here or the oxygen tank will blow up. They're not for you anyhow, they’re for Nick. We first ran into him a few weeks after Christmas. I was driving the ambulance and asked Jeff to hand me my packet of cigs from the dashboard, and he shook his head.

He mutters, “I don’t get why you started. Your whole life is ahead of you. No wife, no kids, no mortgage—you don’t have a damn thing to be stressed about.”

We’ve had this conversation a thousand times. So I try to skip all the theatrics and reach over to grab one, but he starts moving it further away. And I’m trying to look at the road, but I can see him holding back laughter in the corner of my eye. Then I hear thunk and stop the truck. I hop out and there's a deer laying on the road with one of his antlers a few feet further. Luckily, we weren’t going too fast. He gets up a little shaky on his feet. I was cursing Jeff out when I realized the deer was staring at the cigarette in my hand. I don’t know why, maybe I was feeling guilty, but I held it out. He gingerly grabbed it in his mouth and wobbled away. You’ll see him alone, waiting by the side of the road. You can tell it's Nick by the missing antler. Don’t try to swerve around him, or you’ll just put another dent in the truck. He’s polite. Never takes more than one. He’s not picky, either. He’ll take cigarettes, chewing tobacco, a hit of a vape, Zyns, even the nicotine patches from the guys who are trying to quit.

See what I mean? We adapted. No other ambulance has a trauma bag like this. Don’t tell

Ben, but in the bag’s left pocket there's a tranquilizer gun, just in case. Do not use it on people. The right pocket has a leash and treats. Again, not for use on people. Middle pocket has all the basic stuff. There’s an extra pair of trauma shears in here too, but I like to keep a pair on me. A lot of patients get their fur stuck in all sorts of places. In fact—you'll like this one— last month, we had a little boy call us. His hamster went into cardiac arrest. I got the bright idea to use the trauma shears to cut the defibrillator pads real small. I attached them to the hamster and administered a shock. Jeff was pretty sure we cooked the little guy, but he didn’t want to let the kid down, so he started doing tiny chest compressions with his pinkies. Then I hear high-pitched coughs and squeaks and sure enough, the hamster is back on his feet.

That’s mostly everything, and we have 7 minutes to spare. One last thing about up front. Here, behind the seats, there’s a couple of those high visibility vests. I don’t wear it much because I don’t know the last time we washed them. Wear it when you don’t want to be hit by a car. The last call Jeff and I went on came in as ‘unknown medical’, and took us to the middle of nowhere off a state highway. We parked on the shoulder and put on our vests before hopping out. In the ditch by the side of the road, I saw a bit of movement. They don’t give us any flashlights, so I had to pull out my phone. There was a raccoon lying in the grass taking shallow breaths. She was in rough shape.

I patch her up as much as she’ll let me, and Jeff comes and joins. While I’m grabbing bandages, my hand brushes against the brownie in the plastic bag. It’s mushy and months old and probably tastes like carbon monoxide, but I offer her a bit anyway. She only ate a small portion.

She could barely hold her head up, but still managed to lick the last of the brownie off her paws.

I get that terrible feeling in my chest as it starts to sink in that there’s not much else we can do. I realized, I don’t think we’d had a patient die before. Well, an animal patient. People die all the time. I think that’s why I was so worked up. I was just starting to figure it out and now it was just like any other shift. I was crying and gasping for air and dry heaving because all of a sudden it wasn’t fun anymore. And luckily, since she is just an animal on the side of the road, there’s no fire department or family around to see me acting like a jackass.

Her breaths get smaller and quieter until we can’t hear anything. Jeff puts his hand over her chest and says a prayer. I listen until he’s finished. He says the last word and waits a beat before his mouth opens again. For a moment, I hear the most angelic song. The headlights of a car driving by were reflecting off his bald head.

He’s glowing and singing this beautiful song.

Then his voice wavers a bit. He’s not singing.

He’s yelling because the raccoon just sunk her teeth into the meat of his hand. He flails before she falls off, hits the ground with a thump, and scurries away. I finally get a deep breath of air before bandaging Jeff’s hand. We hop back in the ambulance and start driving to the hospital. A bit further down the road, there's an unconscious guy with a broken leg. Our actual patient. He had managed to call an ambulance but passed out before he could say anything. He was walking on the side of the highway for some reason. I guess someone was driving too close to the shoulder and didn’t see him. That's why you wear the high visibility vests.

After that call, Ben said anyone working Thursday nights needs their rabies shots. Jeff isn’t the biggest fan of vaccines, so we need someone else to fill the spot. If you like, you can start working Thursday nights with me. Maybe wait until the end of the shift before deciding that, though. It’s not for everyone.