Not All Calls Have Happy Endings!

This weekend my local newspaper ran a story about a call from many years ago that I have written about here in the past. The article by Bill Vogrin, here is a link http://sidestreets.freedomblogging.com/2013/02/02/sometimes-lives-start-badly-and-there-is-no-happy-ending/17883/ was done with great skill as he (and I) both had hopes for a much different ending to the story. What Bill discovered is that sometimes there aren’t happy endings to stories.

What Bill did find was heart breaking and a true tragedy. Before he published it we had a few conversations about what he had found and how he should handle the information he had collected in his long investigation. Much delicacy was required of Bill, he wanted to tell everything he knew, but doing so would have injured innocent people once again, and he knew it.

So how do you tell the story and at the same time protect the innocent? Well you do what Bill did, you write with courage and skill and heart. I believe the more intelligent and caring reader may be able to find a clue or two in the piece that could lead to finding a beast among us.

If you never read my first post about this a year ago or haven’t read Bill’s article I’ll give you the Readers Digest version of it. My crew and I found a live baby in a trashcan, the daughter of a teenage girl, who believed the baby to have been still born. She was so young herself that the baby was given to the grandparents to raise and so that baby grew up and was eventually returned to her parents.

Yes the two teens that had created her had gone on to marry and have more children, so the return of their first child should have been a celebration right? Wrong! Her “father” and I use that term with great reluctance was accused of and arrested for raping his own newly returned daughter.

Bill found that this dirtbag had made bail and then fled from the law, his whereabouts still unknown as of today. He grew up and went to school in my hometown and may have returned here to hide out as the crime was committed in another state.

I have to admit that when Bill called me with what he had found out I was greatly disturbed as I had created in my own mind a happy ending for the little girl I had pulled out of the trash so many years ago, and told Bill as much. I wanted the fantasy; I wanted my version of the truth, not the real truth.

As Firefighters and this is true for most emergency workers, ambulance medics and EMTs, police and so forth, we rarely ever know what the outcome is of the emergencies we respond to. There is no follow up, no one calls or emails you a week or month or year later to say hey “Do you remember that call you went on?”

All there is for us on most days is the next call and we answer that one, as the last call is cleared from our memory. On the rare occasion our next patient may be transported to the same hospital and we can ask doctors and nurses for follow up, but that is risky as there are laws in place read HIPPA, that prevent us as well as hospital workers from reveling information about a patient.

So depending on the nature of the call, critical life threatening to minor injuries we don’t get much feedback. For the critical life threatening about the only tool we have is watching the obituaries for the next few days, I know it may sound morbid to you that we scan the obits for a patient we treated but it really is a tool we use.

Maybe not for all calls but the ones where the circumstances were unusual or you felt an emotional connection to the family or friends of the patient, in other words the calls we cared about. Some days we saw the obit other days weeks went by with no mention, we took the absence of an obit as a victory.

On other occasions our patients would just show up at the fire station days or weeks later to thank us, what rewarding days those were because we found out firsthand that we had made a difference and also because they generally brought us some sort sweet snack which was always devoured the moment our guests left.

So what Bill did was go find the truth, a truth I wasn’t prepared for and he put into motion more thoughts and more memories of days gone by. I pondered other critical calls I had had over the years and I wondered how many people are still walking this earth because of the difference that a bunch of firefighter and paramedics made on one given day.

I am sure nationally there must be thousands or even more than thousands still out there. I like to think they are having babies, or bouncing grandbabies on their knees. That they have gone on to do something amazing in the world or gone on just to still be a best friend, brother, sister, son or daughter they could be to those around them.

And I hope every now and then they think of us, the men and women of the emergency services business, and out of nowhere they smile a smile that only they know the reason for. That thought makes my day sometimes.

Firefighters can solve any problem.

Firefighters are by nature natural problem solvers. If you think about it we get called for everything nobody else knows what to do with. A citizen calls 911 because something in their life has exceeded their ability to handle it.

The call takers and dispatchers are highly trained professionals that spend many hours in educational classes and are constantly being given new techniques in how to help the general public.

Emergencies that are clearly of a police nature go to the cops, things that are medical go to the FD and the ambulance service, fires duh. What about those gray areas? One thing that seems for some unknown reason to always fall to the fire service is water, water in all its manifestations.

We don’t own the water it is a tool we use in our job, but we aren’t responsible for water. When someone has a water leak in their house they call 911 and are worried that the water is going to get into their electrical system and short it out and then cause a fire. So we get the call.

What do we do? We show up, turn off the water and disable the electrical breakers that are affected. But we aren’t plumbers or electricians we can’t fix it. When there is a big rain storm and the streets become flooded we get the calls for that too.

Okay saving someone that has become stranded in flood waters, we do that, we love that it’s cool. But water flooding through your window wells isn’t really an emergency to us. Yet we go.

One last time we don’t do cats in trees. We don’t do bears in trees, or mountain lions, or any number of critters that climb. We have rescued baby ducks and baby foxes from storm drains, but that is just because we got called and because we want to solve problems.

One December night as we had all settled in for some popcorn and TV the doorbell rang. At the door was one very distraught mother and small child. She was on the verge of hysterics. We wanted to help and got her and the child inside as quickly as we could.

In her hands she clutched a shoebox. We got her to calm down and just tell us what the problem was. Between gasps and shudders she explained that Santa had given her daughter a hamster for Christmas, he name was…

“Mr. Cuddles.” The little girl chimed in.

“and I squeezed him too hard and stuff came out his butt.”

The mother pushed the shoebox toward me.

“He’s in there and he’s alive. But he’s kind of dragging his… his I guess his intestines around behind him.”

I took the box. We all exchanged a WTF do we do glance.

“Okay, so you want us to fix him?” I asked.

“I don’t think he can be fixed I called an emergency veterinarian clinic and they said he should just be put down.”

She began to cry all over again and her daughter grabbed her leg and began to cry and apologize for hurting Mr. Cuddles. We assured her we had experience in these matters and would be able to help her.

An outright lie, but she was killing us with the little girl and all the crying, we just wanted to help her out and get them out of the station.

“We will take care of Mr. Cuddles, and do our best. Okay?” I said.

“Will he be okay?” asked the little girl.

“Honey we will do our best for Mr. Cuddles but he may be hurt too bad to be fixed, if that is true we will still take care of him.”

“Promise?” she said.

“Yeah we promise.”

“Thank you guys so much, I didn’t know what to do my husband is deployed and he normally handles this kind of thing.” Said Mom.

“Well thank him for his service and we are glad to help.”

With that she and her daughter left. As soon as the door closed it began.

“What the hell do we do with a hamster with its guts squeezed out?” asked Blue.

“Let’s take a look.” Said Davey our lieutenant.

He took the box and opened it. Inside was a little fuzzy ball, and it met the description offered by the mother. He slipped the lid back on. Now Davey was a country ass Kansas boy and had grown up on a farm, but he had never been presented with quit a dilemma like this one.

“Well I’m open to suggestions boys.” He looked us over.

“What do you think TimO, can you give it an overdose of some kind of drug that will do the job?” he asked me.

“I don’t know Lou, I can’t give him any of my narcotics I have to account for those.”

“Something else then?” asked Blue.

“We could just drown him, put some rocks in the box and put it in a bucket.” Offered Bobby the driver.

“That’s what we used to do on the farm with unwanted animals sometimes.” Said the Lou.

“Is that humane?” I asked.

“I don’t know, you’re the one that said we could take care of it TimO, not us.” Said Blue.

“We could just leave it outside in the cold I’m sure that would do it.” said Bobby.

“What if they come back to see how it went and see the box outside? That would be awkward.” Said the Lou.

“Let me call one of my Docs and see what they say, maybe they’ll have an idea.” I said.

I went to the office and called one of the emergency rooms and got one of my favorite Docs on the phone. I explained our situation and she offered to help. She gave me permission to mix up a little cocktail of meds, our own version of lethal injection and signed off on the treatment.

We buried the little hamster out in the flower garden the next day.

How to date a Firefighter cont.

Let me continue.

3)If you continue to date you need to once again educate yourself on his work place. Calling and texting are not cool during what you could call business hours 9-5. We are working then, drilling, training, inspecting, and running calls.

Too much time on the phone could even lead your guy into some office time with his officer, so let him set the pace on this. If you text that you want to say hi and he doesn’t get back to you in your timeframe tough, he’s at work, he could be on a call or at drill. Sending another message in five minutes or ten minutes or half an hour isn’t going to score you any points. Lunch time is when we get lunch, it isn’t noon, same thing with dinner, we eat when we can, not by the clock.

If you want the work schedule of a businessman, date a businessman not a fireman. This brings up another good point, we work off a set calendar, most firefighters can tell you if given a few minutes if they will be working on Christmas day three years from now. Okay we work holidays, weekends, anniversaries, birthdays, and overtime.

If your man not being able to get off for some special day is a problem for you, oh well, deal with it. We work shifts and we can give you your very own personal copy of a shift calendar to help you keep track, just ask.

There is another phenomenon with firefighters called trades. A trade, at least for us is a really cool work privilege. Trades are the ability for us to get off of work by having another qualified firefighter come in and work for us. The department doesn’t care who is on the truck as long as the required number of personnel are.

So if a special need arises for us to get off work we can call one of our buddies on another shift and have them cover for us for a whole shift or a few hours.

The downside of trading is when it is time for payback your guy needs to go to work for his friend on a day he would normally have off. The point here is there is a great deal of flexibility in our work schedule but it has a downside of sometimes we just can’t get out of work for your special occasion. We also use this as a way to escape your requests sometimes.

“Oh sorry baby I’d love to meet your book club buddies but I have to pay this trade back.”

4)Guys will have a different personality at the fire station, just understand it has nothing to do with you. It’s all about his social standing within his crew. If you in anyway detract from his maleness, his feeling of being a man among men, you will suffer.

So if you sense he is a little standoffish when you come to visit, just be cool with it, don’t call attention to it. Don’t get your nose out of joint about it and don’t give him grief about it later either. Firefighting is a tough game and showing weakness around anyone over the age of six places doubt in the minds of others.

Showing up unexpectedly can be especially bad. You have no idea of what his crew is doing that day and if you show up when some particularly mundane work assignment is going on like mowing the lawn, or stripping and waxing floors is happening, your guy will be allowed to visit with you but he will pay a price.

Firefighters always honor the visits of friends and family of co-workers we welcome it and enjoy meeting the people that are important to our friends and because the firehouse is such a unique workplace it feels like a house, firefighters don’t have cubicles.

When you show up and he disengages from the work going on he is viewed as using you as a chance to get out of work. This happens because the chronically lazy firefighter does this in real life. When he discovers upon arriving at work that we are going to be stripping and waxing the apparatus floor for the day, will slip out call his wife or girlfriend and ask them to stop by the station. Then when you show up he uses that as an excuse to stop working.

No matter how tempting it feels to just pop by the station and say hi, don’t do it. Also, and I have seen this one firsthand, your hero might be serial dating. It’s really uncomfortable for the crew to watch I guy introduce his girlfriends to each other.

5)Don’t chase, period. These are almost all alpha males, once again it’s why you want one in the first place. So chasing will have the opposite effect, he’ll start dodging you. Let him chase, it’s in his DNA.

Most of us are acquainted with females that want a pet firefighter and we aren’t opposed to that fact for the most part. What we are familiar with is the overly aggressive/possessive chick. The ones that claim ownership way too early in the process, and we notice you quickly and we run away even more quickly from you.

Experienced women should already know this tactic but you guys seem to have an odd mental blank spot when it comes to us. The thrill of having your man in blue overrides your normal skill set and you become anxious. Take a breath and remember you are still dealing with a man, a high bread man a manly man, but at the same time an even more base male than usual.

Taking a bath in a high testosterone environment day in and day out causes these men to function at a level much closer to their primal ancestors then to the executives that control them. A whiff of perfume and the exposure of the correct amount and type of flesh is enough, to dilate their pupils and accelerate their heartbeat. Relax let them come to you.

More tips in the next post.

Do Firefighters do God's work?

Was I doing God’s work? I have been asked this question about my firefighting career and the answer seems simple, yes. But maybe it isn’t that easy. Why would God pick a miserable, unworthy, alcoholic to do his work?

No man or woman can ever know the mind of God I know that. I have had many conversations with God about this over the years. I know I talked with him often when what I was doing was important to me, but was it important Him?

I remember one Christmas morning in a beautiful home with the whole family gathered for the opening of presents and I was there doing CPR on the grandmother under the tree.

I remember the surrealness of it. The setting was right out of a Hallmark calendar. Myself I had spent that morning with my own family doing the exact same thing this family was doing but here I am trying my best to do all the advanced medical procedures I know on grandma.

I had a habit of praying to God under these conditions. Silently of course, didn’t want to spook the boys with overt praying (sorry about that God) on a call. So I would ask God are you going to help on this one? The outcome did and at the same time didn’t rest with me.

He would give clues though in small ways. Dead people and that’s what you are when you have no pulse and aren’t breathing, dead, are very difficult to get IVs on. The absence of a heartbeat flattens out a person’s blood vessels making the insertion of an IV needle very hard.

I had a reputation of being able to get those sticks when others couldn’t and I believe that was the direct result of my conversations with the almighty. I would once again silently pray that if it was His will that I get an IV then I’d get it and if it was my patients turn to board the heaven bus, I wouldn’t.

So was I doing God’s work? I have no idea. Over the course of my career I was a firsthand witness to those boarding the bus and never got used to it. It was like being the ticket agent for a flight you knew was going to crash. You still took the tickets and wished the passengers well. Buh bye.

I delivered nine healthy babies during my career and regular readers know that. I have never mentioned the many times it wasn’t a healthy baby. There were more deliveries than nine but only nine successful births.

So when that happened I didn’t question God on why that happened, I had to turn my focus to the living, the survivors. Only years later and many gallons of vodka later did I realize that I too was a survivor of those events.

I would drink and wonder why did I end up in this job? Why me, I never wanted to be a firefighter. Did God pick me and if he did why? Why did I have to see this stuff? Why did I have to listen to the anguished cries of the survivors and yet no one heard mine?

Probably because my screams were as silent as my prayers, they were private not for public consumption. Now I’m not saying I was hand selected by God to be a firefighter but God does have a way of picking losers to be his agents, and I did feel like a loser for much of my life.

God has a strange roster of losers he has worked with, and once again I am not claiming divine selection or placing myself in the direct company of those listed below, just saying God makes strange choices.

Noah got drunk.
Abraham lied about his wife.
Sarah laughed at God.
Jacob was a deceiver.
Samson had serious anger management issues.
David was an adulterer and a murderer.
Elijah struggled with depression.
Peter denied Christ.
Paul was Saul.
Paul said it best:

“Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of ‘the brightest and the best’ among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses chose these ‘nobodies’ to expose the hollow pretensions of the ‘somebodies’? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That's why we have the saying, "If you're going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God."  ” (1 Corinthians 1:26-28 MSG)

Did I do God’s work? Perhaps and am now finding that my chances to continue still exist.

I’ll return to fun stories next week, promise.