First day first Blog.
15 years ago I started writing notes as a new cadet in the Cannot say Fire department. shootings, car accidents, of course fires and everything in between. We were getting a fatal a day back then in that part of Town and as a new firefighter just starting out I was fascinated by it all.
As weeks and then months went by I stopped writing things down. someone asked me why and I told them that the runs were not interesting enough anymore for people to want to read them in the book I wanted to write. They asked me specifically what I meant and I told them that when I had first got on the job there were police chases where the car would hit a wall and we would be called to give medical assistance to the victims. As one young teen was dying he kept asking about his shoes. I started to realize that the car had hit the wall so hard that his shoes stayed stationary in the passenger floor of the car as he was launched out of the window. I found this interesting. Imagine the impact it takes to fly out of your shoes?
As the summer went on almost all of the car chases would result in accidents and shoeless victims. I still noticed it but it became mundane for me and I never wrote about it in the journal.
this is just a small example that What happens is that you become accustomed to insanity. I always wonder if it is not like that in combat as well. You adjust to something that is insane and it becomes normal.
While explaining this to my friend I realized that the it was not the street that become more or less normal. I had become more accepting of what I saw in the street.Which brings us here to this blog.
Last week a guy who owns an art gallery here in Cant name put a garbage bag over his head and shot himself. the writer in me wondered if it was some final work of art. Did he feel like he was garbage and the bag was a symbolic gesture? Was this a last great work of art lost on the civil service workers who wouldn't know a work of art from, well a dead guy in a bag? It was so emotional for the family and ,specifically, the friend who had found him. To us, it was like buying a gallon of milk at the grocery store. Exactly my point.
Are we inhuman? insensitive brutes? Do we not care? We care. Watch what happens when a child dies in a fire. Specifically one that hurts me every time I think about it. At one of the fire stations around the city there is a toy fire truck on a shelf, burned around the edges. Every time I look at it have to turn away from it because I know the story behind it.
While responding to a house fire the firemen were told there were children inside. As they searched the house they got all of the children out, except one. Trapped in the corner of his bedroom was a little boy clutching his fire truck and, I'm sure, saying to himself it would be OK because the firemen were coming. The boy was found dead clutching the fire truck and one of firemen who found him took the truck home to remind himself of future children out there. When I heard this story It hurt deeply but I wondered how the fireman could look at that truck every day. Well the short answer was that he couldn't. That is why the fire truck is back at the station next to another burnt fire truck. This time I am wise enough not to ask where the other fire truck came from
We live in a world of unimaginable pain and unimaginable greatness simultaneously. We don't live in an Old testament world and certainly not a new testament world but a combination of both. Recently, Cant name had a late season snow storm and I was watching a special on television about changing the way CPR is done in public. 300 chest compressions to one breath. Basically you keep pumping on the chest. The old way was always 5 to 1 and then it was revised and now they were saying just keep pumping. This new technique had not even been taught to us yet. Right about the time the story was ending on CNN we got a call for a 58 year old male in full arrest. We arrived on the scene and a 68 year old male was laying in the street. He had been shoveling his driveway and his wife noticed him on the ground. We set him up for EMS to arrive and Once the paramedics arrived we loaded him into the ambulance and I jumped into the back to continue CPR. His heart beat was ASystole. Basically this means that he would die. When a person is shocked the point is to shock them out of an off rhythm beat to what most people know as a normal heart beat. With Asystole, there is no beat to shock. We still have to continue CPR until a doctor at the hospital pronounces them dead but basically we hare physically working on a dead body. Because the man was going to be DOA and because of his age and because of the article on CNN I started CPR with continuous chest compression rather than a breaths to chest ratio
After a few moments one of the EMS guys told me to stop compressions. We all looked at the heart monitor and there, just at the bottom of the screen was a beating heart. A heart we could shock!
Once EMS shocked the guy his heart beat went from an out of rhythm beat to a beat with a rhythm! The best way to describe this is to start a car without a battery! If you believe in miracles that is about as close as it gets. We never check on patients after we drop them off because so many die and it will wear you down but when this guy went into the emergency room he was alive. Really alive with a beating heart on his own without CPR. I don't know what happened after that but I hope, for his wife's sake, that he made it.
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