Reader’s Digest Canada – September 2019

reach for the hanger. She tells me to

put it back; it was her husband’s once.

The edges of the hat are worn thin.

I see mouldy kitchens, rotted attics.

I leave food out for pets, switch off

lights, turn off the stove under a pot of

oxtails. Once I read half a poem left in

a dead woman’s typewriter.

Ambulance services, at their core,

are about transportation. We do a lot

of assessment and a little bit of inter-

vention, but our main function is to get

people from wherever they are over

to the hospital. We call it “the scene.”

What was the scene like? Is the scene

safe? Are we at a house, a clinic, an

alleyway behind a row of Dumpsters?

In a normal month I attend to,

roughly, between 70 and 100 patients.

Usually two or three of those are lights-

and-sirens, step-on-the-gas, “Johnny,

get the paddles”–type emergencies.

Car wrecks, heart attacks. The rest are

people like Susan: poor, homeless,

old, drunk—people who have stepped

away from or been kicked out of soci-

ety and can’t figure out where else to

turn for help.

I usually see each patient for about

an hour, street to hospital. We have

some frequent flyers, but we only

catch them on their bad days. When

we don’t see someone for a while, it

usually means they either sobered up,

went to jail or died. We arrive at the

crisis point of a story and we almost

never witness its resolution.

THE NIGHT AFTER I finish Desmond’s

book, I write down all my calls for the

shift. I work downtown, from 4:30 p.m.

to 4:30 a.m. That night’s calls include

Tag*, a 41-year-old at a free clinic who’s

had pain in his ribs for about a month.

After Tag is Ronnie*, a 58-year-old

male from a veterans’ housing assist-

ance shelter. He’s having a psych epi-

sode and a runny nose, in that order.

He talks quickly, mostly makes sense,

but veers into paranoia if you let him

steer the conversation too long. His

nose has been running for a week, he

says, and his neighbour stole his pants

and painted them a different colour.

These pants? I point to the jeans he’s

wearing. He’s not sure. He says the guy

crawls under his door every night and

does it and then crawls back out. We

give him some Kleenex and take him

to the veterans’ hospital.

FOR SOME PATIENTS, A 911 CALL IS LESS ABOUT

EMERGENCY AND MORE ABOUT AN INABILITY

TO PROVIDE FOR THEMSELVES.

reader’s digest

74 september 2019