One of the first things my EMS cert teacher told me was that the touchiness would pass. That one day I’d be slipping IV needles into arms as easily as I feather floss between my teeth.
Yet I was two weeks into my first full-time ambulance gig and I was still shaking between calls. The three story inferno raging downtown didn’t help, but that’s not where me and my partner Tom were heading.
Prior to this whole clusterfuck our night was quiet. Mostly dealing with confused dementia patients and burgeoning (harmless) schizophrenics. The MO is either to find their medicine, or transport them to the hospital. Most of our calls were like this, low stakes, right in my comfort zone.
But now we were dispatched to a priority two emergency, the kind of call that necessitates the whole lights and sirens deal. Someone called in a possible self-harm situation involving their neighbor. Serious shit, but I had Tom with me. He was a veteran EMT and former cop so I was always in steady hands.
The issue was that that downtown inferno had fucked traffic two solid miles in front and behind us. We hadn’t moved more than ten yards in five minutes, and even though it was protocol to have a police response as well we were still closest by far. We were the front line at that point.
Another minute passed in gridlock before Tom finally blurted it out. “You’ve gotta go alone.” And there really was no other way. Abandoning the ambulance and blocking further firetrucks wasn’t an option. Solo responses were rare, sure, but necessary in desperate circumstances like this.
I knew it was coming, but goddamn was that the last thing I wanted to hear.
Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to want to. Deep in my heart I would be willing to lay my life down for a patient. I wanted so badly to be that type of cool, methodical mind that entered an emergency situation and eased their patient back from the brink. It just hadn’t come to me yet.
Tom saw this. I’m sure if seconds weren’t the difference between life and death he would’ve given me a five minute pep talk. For now, all he could do was pat my shoulder and smirk. “Knock ‘em alive, kid.”
So out I went. Squeezing myself between the bumper to bumper traffic until I found myself on the correct cross street.
There’s something horrifying in the minutes between their call and your arrival. The feeling creeps in while you’re slipping over broken sidewalks and homeless tents. Realizing you’re the beginning and end of their recovery. It all comes down to you, the practitioner.
To be blunt…you’re God for those few minutes. And God was having a shit time gaining entry.
Someone buzzed me in, but of course apartment 13B was locked. Our response time was already woefully long so waiting for police to break it down was not an option. I went to town using my bump key, prying it open less with finesse and more raw frantic energy.
The door opened to near complete darkness. I saw candles around the corner at the end of the hall, but a whole lot of unknown was between me and there.
Light switches were oddly dead, so my flashlight had to guide my feet. From the little I could see it was a well lived-in apartment, at least two generations had sunk their essences into the carpet.
That’s when the smell hit.
It was familiar. The scent of a man? No. Not exactly. No. It was like my Grandfather’s musk. I hadn’t smelled it since I was in his lap as a kid, but the recall was instantaneous. It made me feel oddly safe. Which lasted only a few seconds considering what I would soon see.
Around the corner there were metric shitton of candles in the living room.
Every surface was covered with them. Weirdly, the wax was melting from every kind of receptacle EXCEPT a candle jar. Bowls, mugs, shot glasses. The source of the musk, no doubt. They cast the entire room in a homemade devilish glow.
They lit my way to the girl I would come to know as Ellie. She was wrapped up in herself in the corner, motionless. Baggy sweats and a white tee hid her frailty at a glance. I rushed to her, set her on her back, and began to triage.
First was the bruising on her neck. Fresh. Must’ve tried some sort of strangulation, but it wasn’t what did her in. So I quickly moved on.
Blood caked her white shirt. I followed it to her wrists. Messy little slashes, but didn’t go deep enough to do real harm. That’s when I noticed the culprit of my lightswitch woes. Sloppily wound duct-tape attaching a FORK to her hand.
Just a foot away from the charred out power outlet.
Jesus Christ she electrocuted herself. Full cardiac arrest. She could’ve died in the seconds it took me to triage.
My hands found position and began compressions irrespective of my panic. I regained some confidence as I found my rhythm, laying the foundation for the AED to work its magic.
The repetitiveness gave me my first moment to take Ellie in.
She was young, maybe even younger than my nineteen year-old sister. Her being in this position seemed so wrong. I could see this face getting drunk at a college party, waiting tables at a diner in town, but not here.
I thought about the second chance I wanted to give her as I continued compressions.
That’s when the room started to feel…warmer. The candle scent now got a bit clearer. It wasn’t the manly musk of my Grandfather, it was an animalistic scent. Dried blood and mange. Something that activated a long buried fight or flight instinct in my primitive genes.
I had to keep on with my compressions though. Even if I had lost track of time. I might’ve been a ways short of two minutes when I decided to cede CPR duties to my AED.
It wasn’t until I unzipped my bag that I realized this was my first time using an AED in the field. I had learned its ins and outs, tested it on course dummies, and seen others use it, but never had I actually been tasked to use it on my own in the field.
I pulled up her shirt and applied the wired pads, again feeling a warmth that sent a bead of sweat down my neck. Finally me, the naive idiot, decided to turn around.
The flames of the candle array now burned twice as bright. They licked high enough to start to uncover the shadows against the walls, revealing scraggly looking wallpaper. No time to admire the setting though.
I waited patiently as the AED robotically counted down and administered the first shock. It picks up heart rhythm automatically, but I still used my fingers to feel her absent pulse directly.
It remained still. No response. Desperate, I re-positioned my fingers as if checking pulses wasn’t the one thing I was supremely confident in.
My fingers wiped some blood from her wrist as I did. Only now did I notice her cuts weren’t at all random…they in fact cut out a symbol in her flesh.
A star? No. It was a pentagram.
But the affirmative BLOOP of the AED took my mind off that fast. It rejiggered her heartbeat, automatically suspending its shocks. Any weirdness I felt came secondary to my resumed chest compressions.
Resuscitation, especially with a faint heartbeat like this, always felt to me like pulling someone out of a quicksand pit. You’re shoulder deep clinging to a couple fingers. Hanging onto that little grip as you try to extract the entire person. If you’re good, that little grip is all you need.
I pumped with that metaphor in my mind’s eye. Laser-focused on my goal. For fifteen seconds I felt like that ideal practitioner I dreamt of being, reeling my patient back from the brink.
Until, I shit you not, the flames gained a life of their own.
At first I thought it was just the ones directly in front of me, but as I spun I realized it animated every live flame. Each one dancing its way towards the ceiling, causing their receptacles to bubble over with wax.
You spend a lifetime watching flames move randomly, flicking with the wind, and I promise you their sudden conscious movements will rattle you deep.
The full red light illuminated what I now realized wasn’t wallpaper…
It was blood-inked writing. Overlapping scrawls of mantras over every wall and even, impossibly, the ceiling. I imagined her crawling like a spider as she wrote Praise be/All Glory to the true One/May his new Kingdom reign. Then finally the one spanning the entire main wall.
May my body serve as his sacrificial lamb.
I suddenly felt like an interloper in a place I should not be, intruding on an ancient ritual. And whatever had its grip on her seemed to be in the room with me now.
The flames kept up their heights so I could take it all in, wax now spilling over onto the floor.
Looking back, I think it was offering me a chance to reconsider what I was doing.
It had its claim on her. But as her practitioner I felt I had an equal claim.
I resumed compressions.
Faster now, desperate to get her back as fast as possible. The flames swirled, seemingly enraged by this development and not letting me forget it.
Yet somehow I was able to separate my technique from my panic-ridden nerves, keeping a tight rhythm for almost a minute before the girl finally snapped upright. The flames dissipated in an instant down to tiny weak flickers.
Her eyes were shut at first, like she was still within a blissful dream. Then her eyes opened to what she seemed to clearly think was a nightmare.
“Where’d he go? Where is he?” She seemed taken by complete surprise, grounding herself back in reality as she pawed at herself. My practiced lines of patient comfort only enraged her.
“You have to let me get back!” With rabid panic she started to stab at her wrists but soon realized it wasn’t the most economical method of returning. I finally regained my composure just as I saw her eyes meet the burned outlet.
I screamed and grabbed at her leg but her hand stretched to reach it. It connected, but unfortunately it seemed she had blown it out completely the last time. No shock administered.
Ellie now kicked me off and stood, searching for a weapon, a way out. It gave me a second to try to reason with her person to person, that practiced bullshit now scared right out of me, but she responded with a level-headed reason that made it feel almost like…
…like she was speaking in my best interest.
“You don’t understand, I’m the last one, he needs me.” She raced across the room to her dresser, rifling through the top drawer. I went to pull her off when she struck me hard, across the face.
It wasn’t a punch to harm, as much as it was a utility swipe. Keeping me away as economically as possible. I was a few feet away when she pulled the knife from the drawer.
There wasn’t any fanfare, no waiting to see the horrified look on my face, she just sliced as fast as she possibly could. I don’t remember if it was two or three good hacks before Tom rushed in to tackle her.
In one swoop he was able to pin her while cleanly plucking the blade from her grip. Blood pooled as he steadied her flailing arms with ease, getting the one she had sliced into the open.
“You okay?” Once we had established that I was at least physically unharmed I got back to work wrapping her wrist, stopping the brunt of the blood flow. Tom reinstated order to my rapidly deteriorating nightmare.
As much as she wailed and cried in that first minute, she settled completely as she was padded up and restrained for transport. Her dead eyes followed me back and forth around the room as I spoke to the arriving police. Burning into my scalp even when I turned around.
She seemed to have come to a realization, something that set her at complete peace even here in the reality she had been forced back into. Stupid me, I reasoned that maybe I had given her a new lease on life that she would cherish.
Stupid me.
.
.
.
That was a week ago now.
There were five total ritual suicides that night, aside from Ellie. All were successful. The first was a young artist who burned herself on a pyre, setting her warehouse studio space aflame. That was the inferno that caught Tom and I in the traffic heap.
My first patient died two days after.
He was a twelve year-old boy suffering from anaphylaxis after eating some mislabeled Chinese food. An epi-pen was administered by his Mom, but it wasn’t enough. We arrived on time and got the epinephrine IV in, however his heart responded in a bizarre fashion.
It began to rapidly slow with the increasing dose. He wasn’t just dying, it was like I was killing him. He died so fast it took his Mom two minutes to realize. The longest two minutes of my life.
One is a fluke but six are a pattern.
Five more of my patients would die, some with completely non life-threatening conditions. My supervisor comforted me after the first but things darkened quickly from there. Despite the fact that I was investigated and could not have done anything different, I was suspended indefinitely.
It took me almost a week to find Ellie.
From the hospital they bounced her between a few psych wards until landing her at one for, how shall we say, the more intense cases. Despite this their windows were not barred, just thick and secured tight with a latch. Something told me hers would be unlocked. It was.
She’s sleeping. Been this way for the last hour.
I’ve gripped and released the knife in my pocket a hundred times over.