Necessary Lies

NECESSARY LIES

The dispatcher’s voice burst through the fire station speakers: medical aid, male fainting, in his seventies. The address, only ten blocks away, was easy to find and close to a community center. My crew—myself and three firefighters—jumped on the fire truck and launched out of the station. My request to dispatch for additional information received little more, except to discover an ambulance with EMTs or paramedics would be on a delayed response. Lately, that delay had gone as high as twenty minutes.

We pulled up to the curb fronting a large bungalow and went to the front door with our equipment. Not locked. We stepped inside and stopped, taken by the eerie feeling we often get stepping into a stranger’s home. Sobs emanated from a door down a hallway; a door we’d seen scores of times where grief lay behind it. Heartbreak and tragedy for many. Always, we expected the unexpected, occasionally, the odd surprise awaited.

We announced ourselves loudly before heading for that door not wanting to shock anyone on the other side. A man lay prone on the floor, pale and elderly. Some blood pooled on the hardwood where he’d likely collapsed and injured himself. The room was a home office. A sobbing white-haired woman knelt over him, crying softly. She looked up at us with shattered, glazed eyes.

As the captain, I had specific tasks to do. My men tended to the elderly patient while I helped the woman to her feet and moved some furniture to the sides of the room to make room for my men to work. I wheeled a swivel chair out of the room to the front room and indicated that she sit.

Alice was her name. Her husband was seventy-four with a failing heart. He’d been on the phone when he collapsed. Alice was a diminutive woman, frail, her short hair a shock of white. Her skin was clammy and the rings on her gnarly fingers looked like they were too large, as though she wore someone else’s.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she moaned, exasperation edging her words. “Bert was…always so strong. He looked after me when I was ill.”

Although we were in the front room, I only had to lean back to see my men initiating code red protocols: airway intubation, oxygen, and electrode pads pasted on Bert’s chest. I asked her to round up Bert’s meds and she got halfway out of the chair, then stumbled. I held her arm tight and set her back down. She began to cry louder, keening, her head in her hands, rocking back and forth. I prompted her again for the meds and she told me they were at Bert’s bedside on the night table.

I went down the hallway passing the office door, feeling my heart sink when I saw one of my men on his knees beside Bert’s chest, pressing down on his sternum, performing CPR.

“Call it in, Captain,” said one of my men.

I nodded and closed the door then went to round up four bottles of meds. After radioing dispatch on Bert’s condition, I quickly returned to Alice and wrote down the meds on my run sheet.

Alice asked me if Bert would be okay. I did what I almost always did--lie--like I had many times, too many. I was incapable of telling the truth. We provided technical implements, medical knowledge, and hours and hours of training. But no truth machine. Alice had only hope and prayers. From the other room, I could almost make out the recorded voice on the AED, the automated external defibrillator, telling my men to stand clear.

“His pulse was okay when we arrived,” I explained, the lie coming easy.

I felt a thump on the wood floor, the sound coming from the room. I knew it was Bert’s spasming body thumping against the hardwood as the machine zapped his heart.

Alice abruptly stopped crying. “What was that? Was that my Bert?”

She began to get up, but I restrained her. For her to witness the seeming chaos of CPR and chest compressions, strange medical equipment, and intrusive intubation would be too much for her. “I’ll see how he is.” I patted her hand and went to poke my head in the door.

The shirts of my men were already sweat-stained, their tasks intense and focused on Bert; pouring the oxygen into him while compressing his sternum. They silently counted compressions to ratios of oxygen and obeyed the AED voice instructions. They discussed what should be next and asked each other if they wanted to swap positions. The machine voice told them to stop CPR, then analyzed Bert’s heart rhythms.

One of my men looked up and wiped sweat from his brow. “Got an ETA on the paramedics?”

I shook my head. “No pulse?”

“When we started, I think we had something,” he said.

That in itself was a small victory. Baseball players are used to experiencing defeat. The best major league batters hit .300, which is only three times out of ten, yet are considered a great success, the players worth millions. For first responders, success was far less, elusive. Yet when it was achieved it was better than winning a World Series. Working heart attack calls with almost constant defeat can occasionally be crushing, causing second-guessing, a host of what-ifs, and futility of efforts.

And a somber return to the station.

I returned to the room and sat with her looking at pictures of Bert and Alice displayed on a hutch. Wedding Day. Children graduated. Grandkids. An award for community service. A citation from a former provincial politician. A golf trophy from a charity. Bert beaming as he shook hands with someone. All benchmarks and victories in a long life. Now Bert, in the other room, made his mark on us. If only people like this could live forever.

I looked at his broken wife and began another string of lies. “Bert’s a strong man and he’ll pull through.” “He’ll do better once we get him to the hospital.” “My men are good at this.” “His heart’s in de-fib which means it’s still in action.”

She gripped my hand and thanked me for each false assurance. I drew in a deep breath and returned her grip. “Try not to worry. My men are doing all they can.” I was not good at compassion. This would be the best time to have a female on my crew. Women firefighters were much better at consoling. They came off as more trusting somehow. Perhaps better liars than I.

My portable radio scratched to life. The EMTs had arrived. Sounds of their ambulance doors opened and close as they rounded up equipment. Through the door entered three paramedics and two EMTs. I pointed out the door at the end of the hallway, handing one of them the list of meds.

Alice looked alarmed. “Why so many? He’s bad, isn’t he? Why can’t they just go, get him to the hospital?” Her breaths came short and rapid. Her head shook with small vibrations.

“There’s always three or four of them. They need that.”

My men, temporarily relieved for a few minutes, began to move furniture out of the room, making room for the medical teams. I suggested to Alice we go outside. I asked one of my men to help me support her and we went outside to the sidewalk.

“Do you think all those people can help him?” asked Alice.

I posed the question to my crew who had come outside and were unloading the stretcher from the ambulance. Alice gave them a hopeful look that wasn’t lost on them.

“Yes, Ma’am,” said one of them. “They have several drugs to get his heart started--”

“Stopped? His heart stopped?” She looked at me as if to challenge my lie.

I glowered at my man, who caught that as well.

He cleared his throat. “It’s uh…not really stopped, ma’am, it’s in defib. Their drugs will give it a kick start.” The firefighter was a recent academy graduate uncomfortable with these scenarios. My men pushed the stretcher to the door and lifted it up the stairs and inside the house.

The tree-lined street was quiet. Some children could be heard from a nearby playground. I was dying for a cigarette and a stiff drink, weary from lying, yet reluctant to be truthful.

“What happens now?” she asked.

I gulped, wishing I could be honest and tell her ‘funeral arrangements’ but that would be callous. “They’ll pack him up and take him to the university hospital. More people there can help him. They have great heart teams there.” The men took the stretcher inside.

“What should I do?” she asked.

She said it with such a forlorn expression it caused a wave of sorrow to wash over me. I had to look away. I wanted to leave. C’mon guys, hurry the hell up. Get your ass up, Bert.

The front door opened. One of my men gripped the end of the stretcher and guided it down the small set of stairs onto the walkway. An EMT did heart compressions as he walked beside the stretcher wheeled down the walk. A face mask obscured much of Bert’s pale features as oxygen was bagged into him by one of my men. By the looks of things, it appeared the responders would not be increasing their batting averages. Litter from blister packs and tape pieces fell from a blanket covering Bert’s chest.

Alice lost it.

I barely caught her as she went down. Her moans and cries and sobs were the worst I’d ever heard. I think she knew. I couldn’t even form a lie when I needed it most. Her grief turned me to stone for a moment. She tried to pull away from me, breaking the spell.

“Can you call someone to be with you?” I asked, hanging onto her forearm.

She shook her head continually, her eyes on Bert being packed into the ambulance.

“Someone, a son or daughter? A relative or friend?” I glanced around at the houses. “A neighbor?”

“No, she whispered weakly. “We moved here from Calgary last year. Away from our children, because…” her words drifted away.

The pictures in the house were only images now, like the ones of strangers framed in photography studios or on shelves at the Bay. Alice’s hopes and prayers were her own.

The ambulance doors slammed. My men went into the house to clean up the detritus in Bert’s office.

“I’ll get you in the other ambulance so you can meet Bert at the hospital,” I said.

An EMT heard me as she passed. “Sorry Captain, we’re needed on another call.” She hopped in the vehicle and both ambulances tore away.

Alice and I stood on the sidewalk surrounded by emotions. “No one to call, Alice? You sure?” I asked, not able to fathom there wasn’t at least one person she could lean on.

She nodded and turned to me wearing a bewildered expression. Then she startled me with a sudden embrace, a crush. I must have shrunk back and felt her pull away, but I held her, absorbing a rack of sobs. Her body felt like a bundle of sticks. She smelled of talcum powder and soap. In all the world, Alice had no one but me. My men quietly filed outside, allowing her brief consolation.

I thought the worst I’d ever done, or would do to Alice, was a lie. Not so.

Dispatch prompted me on the radio, needing us back in service for a fire call. I gently released Alice. “We gotta go.”

“Please…”

I had no rope to throw her.

The moment was truly heartbreaking. Duty called, and duty abandoned her.

“I’ll get my dispatcher to call you a cab. Get your purse and lock up behind you.” I guided her up the walk to the door. “I’m so very sorry, Alice.”

I sincerely wished she could be with Bert one more time. We left her alone with her hopes and prayers, never to see her again.

Alice haunts me to this day. When an ambulance races down a street I can almost feel her crying and her thin frame against me.

And I think of the responders preparing their lies.

~ The End ~