Tools

It’s three-thirty in the morning. A  lady called because she has leg pain from a previous accident. She lives on the third floor. The cynical Lieutenant Morse triages the patient en-route, and decides that she is a drug seeker and will most likely refuse to walk down the stairs. Brian, the ever patient and wise partner stops the truck and goes for the stair chair in the rear compartment.

“We won’t be needing that,” says the wise and experienced Lt. “Watch and learn.”

You would think that after all this time the cynical Lieutenant Morse would know better. Forrest Gump said it best, “Rescue runs are like a box of chocolates…you never know what you’re going to get till you get there.”

We climb the stairs, and there is our patient, sitting on a couch, a cast from her toes to her knee covers her left leg. She looks like she’s about to go crazy. And she’s at least two-hundred pounds.I think she’s been eating a lot of boxes of chocolates during her convalescence.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“”My leg! It’s driving me crazy! The itching was too much so I stuck a spatula down the side but the end broke off. Every time I move it digs into my leg!”

She moves to demonstrate, then screams in pain.

“I think it’s bleeding.”

“Brian, get the chair.”

Would a carpenter use his hands to drive a nail into a piece of wood? Or a ditch digger dig a hole without a shovel? Or a painter use his hands to cover a wall?

Of course not! So why do I make life difficult by trying to get away with not using the tools that come with the truck? It’s become a battle of wills, and I’m losing the battle. I’ve wrestled with the same intoxicated people who call us daily while trying to haul them into the truck, my reasoning being that “only sick people deserve the stretcher.”

I’ve spent hours in dingy stairwells “helping” young people who vomited once, and said they were too sick to walk, down the stairs.  Oh, they’ll walk alright, I’ll teach them to call 911 for nothing!

Some people never learn. Others do, but it takes a while.

We put the lady in the chair and carried her out.