I hadn’t been there two months when Tom Spencer approached me about being his partner. “Herb’s out permanently with his back,” he said. “I could use someone with a cool head who knows his way around, and doesn’t talk too much. Looking at you, I didn’t think you’d be a good lift, but you look like you’re putting some muscle on. I’ve heard no complaints about you.”
I jumped at the chance to work with him. While I told him I’d have to check with Fred first, which was a commonly recognized courtesy, I was excited, and Fred told me to go for it. I think he was aware of the occasional tension between us, and was looking forward to a break from me. Besides, he had his eye on another new hire—a plump, pretty girl named Terry. Every time we saw her, he told me how much he would like to poke her.
Working with a medic meant I’d tech the bullshit calls, the medic would do all the serious ones. I saw it as an opportunity to learn more about the medicine side of the job. As a basic EMT, all I could really do was put the patient on oxygen and hope my partner drove like hell to the hospital if a medic wasn’t available. Working with a medic, you actually saw drugs being given. The patient would get put on the heart monitor, Tom would do an intravenous, through which he could give drugs which he carried in a hard black suitcase called a Biotech. If the patient wasn’t breathing, or was having a very hard time, he could put a breathing tube down their throat. All of these required a smart partner to assist him. I wanted to be that—a good partner.
We got a call for abdominal pain. Eighteen-year-old girl. Fat, two hundred twenty pounds. Meets us at the door. Now we get lots of BS calls. People calling the ambulance for a toothache, calling for a runny nose, calling cause they cut their finger and need a Band-Aid. People call because they don’t know better or because they use the ER as their private doctor and they know if they call 911, they’ll get a free ride courtesy of their state card, and the ride will come within a couple minutes. Fred, as I’ve said, liked to give people a hard time. You called an ambulance for this? Do you know how much it costs the state to transport you? My fucking tax dollars. Blah, blah, blah. Tom, on the other hand, except on rare days, had learned it wasn’t worth getting worked up about. Now I would not consider him to be a man of great compassion—he was as cynical as the next guy, but he was, after a number of years on the job, a realist. “Give me the choice between a bullshit-walk-’em-out-to-the-rig, sit-them-on-the-bench, drive-to-the-ER, and-walk-them-into-the-waiting-room versus a third-floor-carry-down, rectal-bleed, vomiting-blood, three-hundred-pound person who codes on you halfway down, I’ll take the BS call,” Tom said. “I mean, I get paid by the hour, not by the pound or by the number of times I stick them with needles.”
Tom sees the girl, and just says, “What hospital?”
“Saint Francis.”
He says to me, “She’s all yours.”
We walk her out to the ambulance, she steps up in back as I say, “Watch your head” and “Be careful,” then I get in next to her and grab the BP cuff. Tom is already driving to the hospital. At first I used to get annoyed that he didn’t even wait for me to take the blood pressure before he started, but over time, it forced me to get better at taking pressures, preparing me for real life situations when hopefully, one day as a medic, I’d be taking pressures on critical patients while going down the road, hurtling over the bumps and potholes at seventy miles an hour.
“Tell me about the pain you’re having?” I asked.
“It’s real crampy,” she said. “It comes and goes, but it’s been coming quicker and lasting longer.”
“Cramps?” I said.
She nodded.
“When did you have your last period?”
“It hasn’t come for a while.”
“Are you having a cramp right now?”
She nodded. “It feels like I’ve gotta go to the bathroom. I think I just wet myself.”
There was a dark wet splotch growing around her groin, and it didn’t smell like pee or shit.
“Tom!” I called.
“What?”
“Get back here.”
“I thought you had it.”
“I think she’s having a baby,” I said.
“Oh, Christ!”
He pulled over and joined me in the back. I had already moved her from the bench to the stretcher, and after covering her with a blanket, with her help, started pulling down her pants.
Tom and I looked and there was a head coming out from between her legs.
“When’s your due date?” Tom asked.
“Due date? I don’t owe any money.”
“Due date. You’re pregnant. You didn’t know that?”
She looked like she didn’t understand.
“You’re having a baby!” Tom shouted at her.
“That can’t be. My boyfriend said not to worry.”
“Well, I’ve got news for you, he was wrong.”
Tom, who’d gloved up, delivered the head, then the shoulder. I stood there, useless as tits on a bull. What a sight it was. A crying baby boy born out from between the legs of that teenage girl. She didn’t even know she was pregnant, but when Tom put the baby on her breast, she looked at that infant with a smile of wonder like I believe Mary must have looked at the baby Jesus. Tom let me cut the cord, my hand was shaking. I even had tears in my eyes. “Just cut it already,” he said.
He made sure the baby was kept warm. He wrapped the baby up in towels and taped them together so the baby looked like he was in a papoose. He told me to drive the rest of the way while he made certain everything was fine with the mother and child. At the hospital, when I went around back to pull the stretcher, Tom was telling her, “You have to name the baby Thomas Timothy in honor of the two of us. It’s the law, you have to name the baby after the paramedics if you delivered in an ambulance. It’s also good luck. You can call him Tommy Tim for short.”
“Okay,” she said, “but he look just like Shariq.”
“Too bad for Shariq,” Tom said.
But she didn’t hear him. She was looking in the baby’s eyes like there was a magnetic field between the baby’s eyes and hers.
***
Two weeks later we got called for an unknown. The mother found a newborn baby in the toilet. Tom did CPR on the baby and breathed in its mouth as he carried him down to the ambulance. He passed a breathing tube into the baby’s mouth, and turned that blue baby nearly pink. Another girl who didn’t know she was pregnant.
“They either need to improve the schools around here, which they do, or else God is in this city and working in mysterious ways. If he is going to be knocking these chicks up, he’s got to tell them they’re carrying a child, not just getting fat from too many Big Macs,” he said.
I certainly was getting a view of life—the view of seeing the rich and seeing the poor as just people, people who had to deal with their bodies failing them, people who would all one day die. That was the great equalizer.
***
One evening I even went to the top of City Place where coat-and-tie security men led us to the office of a powerful man who’d lost his bowels sitting at his mahogany desk looking out over the lit-up city. I saw his shame and fear, but I did not mock him. Millionaire or pauper, I treated everyone the same. I laid a fresh sheet on the stretcher, put the oxygen on his pale face, patted his clammy hand and told him not to worry. When we got downstairs, we paused before we wheeled the stretcher out into the wet street where 452 idled, the red and white lights reflecting in the dark street puddles and the glass of the building across the street. I pulled the wool blanket up to the man’s neck, draped a white towel over his head and tucked it under his chin like it was Mother Teresa herself I was protecting from the rain. And I drove smooth and steady over the city-worn streets, while Tom did his job in the back, giving the man IV fluids, medicine and attaching him to the monitor to check his beating heart.