LOST SOUL AND BACK AGAIN
The Boy in the Rain
Death came to visit tonight in a little ramshackle dwelling on School House road. We were pulling up just behind her in our rescue truck, it’s siren announcing our arrival. I swear I could see her, Death, like a wisp of smoke as she entered the house just ahead of us. Something tells me we don’t have much time, as I jump out the passenger door of the truck, and right into a six inch puddle of rain and mud. I grab and O2 bottle and jump kit and turn towards the house.
We follow death up to the front door pausing where it has not, and knock loudly. “Fire Department!”
We’re led into the muddy wet foyer where our patient lies face up, drenched from the downpour, and as pale as death herself. I make a half hearted attempt to get a glimpse of the apparition I’d seen earlier and was surprised to find it absent. Could it be that she has already taken up residence in the child, and we were too late?
With my hands on auto pilot I decide to try to get a little more information to go one. We are just about to initiate CPR on a nine year old boy. I have questions I need answers too. Ones like, how long had he been out in the rain before she had gone looking for him?
Did she find him outside somewhere and dragged him into the house or did he get here on his own will power before collapsing? Did she try to resuscitate him before calling us? All these answers I filed away in my brain for later use as we began CPR, having found him pulse less and apneac.
In between my chest compressions I steal a glance up at the mom to see how she was faring given the circumstances. Looking into her eyes that night gave me a window into a world I pray I will never have to walk in.
Through the tears her eyes reflect back a tortured soul, drowning in anguish as she watches events unfold before her that she has no control over. Hadn’t she taught her child that she would always be there to protect him, and hasn’t he trusted her like only a child can trust. Now she is in a world that is foreign to her and completely out of her control.
If her child is to live or die tonight it is not through her efforts, but that of two strangers who seem to know what they were doing. All my efforts in questioning are rewarded with uncontrolled sobbing. I make no effort to keep her at bay and allow an anguished mother to caress her child, maybe for the last time…
“I am so sorry ma’am we will do everything possible for your little boy. He is in very capable hands now,” so mumbled the kid (me) in the rumpled turnouts.
I can say no more. I have already made that switch from man to machine, bent upon solving a mechanical problem that lies before me. The mechanics were this, the small autonomous pump that is his heart has ceased to produce any electrical activity, therefore no pumping action, and at some point our subject had ceased all inspiration and expiration as well. He wasn’t breathing.
I had to do it; it was my protective mechanism, the only way I knew how to insulate myself from the trauma I was exposed to on a daily basis. At some point in the call, I’ve become the mechanic and the victim, the car. I break out my tool kit, pull out one of my favorite drills, and go to work.
An hand on my shoulder brings me back to the reality of the tragedy before us. The boy’s mother wants an update. Did she find him in time? Did she call us in time? Were we fast enough getting here to save her baby?
At that moment an unwanted thought pops into my head. ‘Lady I can’t even save myself, how am I gonna save your son’?
The real question is; Do I have enough chemicals on board for optimal, on the call performance? I am in my early twenties, an alcoholic and a drug addict with a dangerous love affair with cocaine. What I wanted to say was this.
‘I’m sorry ma’am, but somewhere between a razor blade, a mirror, cocaine, and your frantic call, I may not have gotten the mix right. Is this functioning addict going to become a non functioning one half way through saving your son’s life’? God I hope not.
Still got my drill out, and working away feverishly on the prone subject at my knees.
Now don’t get me completely wrong here. I am a good medic, and I know just what to do when the odds were against me despite, my relative newness to the industry. To my credit I was a rising star in the Emergency Room and Intensive Care Unit of the hospital where I spend my days. Nights at the fire department belong to me.
With me tonight is Kyle Kirchner, our Station Chief. He is the take-charge guy when there’s a fire, but when it comes to medical emergencies, the job is mine!
Being the senior medically trained firefighter on the scene, it fell on me to call the shots, to be right, and to be right fast enough!
I have no idea how long we’ve been working on her son, but I am sure she lives and dies with us each time we are rewarded with a heart beat, only to lose it again. She watches her baby, and our bent forms as we struggle to get his heart beating once more. The anguish in her eyes comes and goes like the tide as we fight for his life, pleading inside for this one to go right!
Part Two
I don’t remember how long this scene played out before we knew we had won, but I am sure it is a scene that will never stop playing for his mother. I have found that I cannot always separate myself or insulate myself from the ongoing tragedy before me. In this case I came there a cool calculating man, a mechanic, with a job to do and found I could not distance myself from it.
Maybe it was because it was a child we were working on, or the insistence of the mother to stay involved with the battle unfolding before her. Perhaps the barrier that the drugs erected in front of me had begun to lose its structural integrity and the humanness of this night was getting through to me.
There have been a number of times in my life where I have held the life of another in my hands, but at no time is that responsibility as evident as when that life is that of a child. There have been but a few times when I have had that sacred privilege, when the hopes and dreams, quite literally the life of an anguishing mother, all rested on my shoulders.
Here I was with the life of a child in my arms, and how could I have even been remotely worthy to be given that opportunity? I know, that that experience is one that I will keep for the remainder of my life, and one I will always cherish. Perhaps if my own life amounts to nothing, what I did that night is justification enough for my existence here on earth.
Being the daddy of two small boys has given me insight into the above event, which I did not previously have at the time. I had no idea the kind of trust it must have taken for her to turn her child over to me, or the feelings of helplessness she had to have gone through.
I cried when my baby had to have an IV. I don’t know if I could have held up like this woman did that night, as her child was dying at her feet; and there could have been no question in her mind that he was dying. One doesn’t receive CPR for a fever and a bad cold. She had to know her odds were not good, and they weren’t.
Had I known all that I know now, maybe my hands would have faltered, maybe I would have hesitated at the responsibility entrusted to me then. I didn’t need to ride in the ambulance this time with the paramedics, and I walked away from the near tragedy on Schoolhouse Road, knowing that this time, when I held the life of that child in my hands, that trust was well placed.
I didn’t know then what a blessing that night was for me, and yes, how much a privilege it was to be in that position. Today I know it, and I pray that I will never have to stand in that woman’s shoes with my own child. If I do, I pray that the person who kneels down at the side of my precious one knows just how sacred an opportunity it is that they have, and that they too do it right, and do it fast enough!
I didn’t notice the rain pounding on my head this time as I walked down the muddy driveway to the truck. I didn’t notice anything. I just knew that this time we had won.
Epilogue;I was to learn later that the boy, a mere nine years old, had collapsed that night due to high fever and infection from a near fatal case of Spinal Meningitis. He made a full recovery and has no memory of that night. That nightmare and the following miracle belongs solely to his mother, this recovering drug addict, and a handful of doctors and medics who gave their all to save his life.