Don't Ever Come to My House

Those were the words I heard most often in EMT-B school aside from "BSI, scene safety". Instructors and their aides do not wait until you have certain knowledge; from the second week, they were throwing scenarios at us on a daily basis to test us for knowledge absorption (they only waited until the second week because we spent the first week filling out paperwork and answering questions). At first, it consisted of an instructor pointing to a random student and saying something like, "okay, your buddy there is choking. He's got his hands on his throat and he's making no noise. What are you gonna do?"

That evolved three weeks later into another instructor running and screaming that high-pitched girl scream all the way through the room, up to the front, swept up in front of my partner and howled something unintelligible except for the words "not breathing" - and extended an infant-sized mannequin (yes, "manikin" is INCORRECT) to him. My partner froze, so I grabbed the fake child and started checking breathing and pulse and then began CPR.

(Now that you have that image in your head, imagine the instructor is a 6'9" wall of muscle-bound manliness doing the most amazing and ear-piercing girlie shriek ever attempted. I couldn't hear well for a week.)

By the final three weeks of class we were running fully-orchestrated scenarios, complete with our instructors friends, spouses and kids playing the victims. Throughout all of it, every single time someone would either freeze or do something absolutely idiotic one of the instructors would say, "please, if I call 911, don't ever come to my house."

I told you that story to tell you this one.

Just over a year ago, I got called to a child drowning. Drownings are extremely common in my neck of the sparse woods, 99% of them involving children. Usually they occur in pools, but I've seen kids drown in bathtubs, buckets, latrines and sinks. (NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: this is where I remind you that a child is eight times as likely to drown inside the house than to ever be even injured, let alone killed, by a gun - so it behooves you to watch ALL kids around water. I now return you to your regularly scheduled bloviating.) I've been to a few drownings at this point and they never get easier. I think they're easily the toughest calls we ever run on. Every single time there's a parent, grandparent or babysitter devastated beyond rational thought saying over and over, "I just turned around for a minute..."

This one was a little closer to home. I recognized the address, though I couldn't place where I knew it from at first. When we pulled up I realized it was the home of one of my friends from EMT school. We'd spent some time studying there. At the time, his older sister had just gotten married. I was about to find out she now had two children. It was the youngest, a one-year-old, who'd been pulled from the pool.

He hadn't gotten an EMS job. He'd planned to hold out for one of the local fire departments in Arizona, and that was the last I'd heard of him until this day. When we got to the backyard, he had just stopped performing CPR. As I stood there, the infant started spitting out water and mucus and my friend rolled the little boy over to let it all out. I stood there, shocked, my mouth hanging open, while my partner immediately got to work suctioning the baby's mouth. He had to remind me to start getting the Stryker ready.

We packaged the baby and headed for the nearest hospital, where my friend wrapped me in a bear hug (I'm obviously NOT like my six-foot-tall counterparts) and tearfully thanked me for responding so quickly. He then stepped back, laughing for the first time through his tears, and said, "you totally froze like a deer in headlights! What happened to you?"

Not knowing what else to say, I replied, "I guess I wasn't expecting to see you already doing my job!"

He poked me in the arm and said, "if I ever call 911 again..."

I interrupted, "yeah, yeah, yeah!"

And he finished, "you better have a bottle of Jaeger with you, you jerk!"