War Stories

Deloy and Cesar are two guys I used to work with. They were "old cowboys" when I was a rookie, and just got older and cowboy-ier as time went by. When the chips were down there were few better medics to be found. And when the shift was over, well, let's just say they made the rest of us feel better about our drinking problems.

This is a story that Deloy recently sent to me:

Cesar was my partner for a while at NOHD. (New Orleans Health Dept) Besides being a very cool person, he was one of the best paramedics I have ever met. I learned a lot from him over the years. It seemed to me that anytime we worked together somebody died a very painful death. In a lifetime of memories, some of them kind of hazy, I was provided one of the most terrifying, sphincter constrictions of my entire life on one very early morning, or late night depending on how one looks at it, at the corner of Esplanade and N. Miro. As coincidence would have it, Cesar and I were partnered that fateful morning/night.

Picture this. It’s 0500. (that’s 5 a.m. for those of you that don’t know) It has been a pretty typical night for us except nobody has died yet. We had managed to keep everybody alive so far. Our shift was scheduled to end at 0600 (6 a.m.) we get a call. It’s a “Code 2 20-I”. (minor traffic accident) We meandered that way thinking we would get a couple of refusals and head on to the house. We arrive at our destination to discover that somebody had gotten some really bad information and it was painfully obvious we definitely were not going to be getting off on time. This was no minor accident. There were two cars involved, a Toyota Corolla and an older Delta 88, ya know one of those land barges. (For those of you who think that after a bunch of years on an ambulance that the adrenaline is gone, I can tell you this, it doesn’t ever completely go away and if anybody tells you differently they are liars) When you arrive at something that is supposed to be minor and to the naked eye you see a guy on the hood of a very crunched up Toyota Corolla with two more guys squished at funny angles to your left and an overturned land barge on your right the adrenaline has a funny way of showing up. We got out of the unit and Cesar went to the left and I went to the right. The land barge had come to rest against somebody’s house and was upside down. I looked in and this woman of undetermined age was saying, “Hep me….Hep meeee…..Hep meeee!” Well, at least she was breathing so I went to check on the other patients. As I turned around and looked toward the other car, I didn’t see Cesar anywhere and I went that way. I went by the front of the unit and saw Cesar kneeling in the neutral ground by a person. He asked me to help turn the guy over so he could check for any major trauma. So we did and he definitely had some major trauma. Evidently, his head had struck the curb during his flight from the aforementioned land barge. Aside from the majority of his brains hanging out of his head there was no other major trauma that we could tell at the moment. There was only one minor complication to this particular patient. You would think that after taking flight from the aforementioned land barge and striking one’s head on a curb and landing face down in the neutral ground and having most of one’s brains hanging out of one’s head that one would be dead. This particular guy though had to be difficult and complicated. He was not dead. He was still breathing. I’m not talking about that barely breathing stuff either. He was breathing like a normal person. He even had good strong pulses. Well, I still had to go check on the 3 guys in the very crunched up Corolla and I left Cesar to tend to the brains-hanging-out-of-his-head-still-breathing guy. Those guys were all in a bad way also. The cavalry was called out. We had the fire department, extrication and several other units come to our aid. Without going through all the technical stuff that happened next, everything went like clockwork or as near to clockwork as something like this could get.

We were out on the ramp at Charity cleaning the unit, cleaning our uniforms, (somehow every time I worked with Cesar I always ended up with blood on my shirt but that’s nothing a little peroxide won’t take care of) talking about the wreck and congratulating ourselves on a job well done and so forth and so on.

All of a sudden, in the crystalline early morning light one of the nurses came out and uttered the words that will forever remain the most terrifying words I think I have ever heard. “Where’s the baby?” (Once again, for those of you who think that after a bunch of years on an ambulance that the adrenaline is gone, I can tell you this, it doesn’t ever completely go away and if anybody tells you differently they are liars) After a few moments of deafening silence, one or both of us (I’m still not sure because my brain cell was still trying to wrap itself around those 3 words “Where’s the baby?”) said, “What baby?” The nurse looked rather agitated when she said, “Well, the woman said that her baby was with them and she wants to know how it’s doing. You mean to tell me that y’all didn’t transport the baby?”

The conversation that followed is not fit for family conversation so I will not repeat it word for word. Just suffice it to say that in the next eternity of 4 minutes as Cesar and I drove back to the scene at warp speed there were many expletives uttered. I think we both smoked about a pack of cigarettes apiece. Oh wait, forget I said that because you can’t smoke in the ambulance. If there was ever a time I needed a beer it was then.

We finally arrived back at the scene and the police were there and the fire department was throwing sand on the leaking car fluids and cleaning up the general mess. We got out of the unit and one of the policemen evidently noticed our excitable state and asked, “Did y’all forget something?” with a kind of a half smirk on his face. We told him that we had forgot something and told him what it was. (Once again, for those of you who think that after a bunch of years in an ambulance, fire truck or police car, that the adrenaline is gone, I can tell you this, it doesn’t ever completely go away and if anybody tells you differently they are liars) As his half smirk turned into an open mouthed gape, every single person on the scene froze for a second or two letting this new development set in. Everybody seemed to unfreeze at the same time and we all started searching high and low for a baby. Before you ask the question, no there was no car seat in the car but in N’awlins that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. We searched the trees and bushes. We searched under the houses. We searched porches and yards. There was not an inch of that area that did not get searched.

Finally, we got a phone call from Charity. The grandmother had arrived there with the baby safe and sound. She had kept the baby for the night so the couple could go have a night out. I was so relieved I could barely move. If there was ever a time I absolutely needed a beer it was definitely now.

We drove around the corner to our headquarters and turned in our equipment. We sat there and talked for a little while out in the bay area. Our adrenaline had disappeared into hibernation once again. As we sat there completely drained and noticed it was now 0900 (9 a.m.) I asked Cesar, “you know how they have “this day in history” in magazines and newspapers and such?” “yeah” “I’m glad there was no baby out there because if there woulda been they woulda said, “50 years ago today Deloy and Cesar really f*^%#d up.” “yeah, I know.”

(For the last time, for those of you who think that after a bunch of years on an ambulance that the adrenaline is gone, I can tell you this, it doesn’t ever completely go away and if anybody tells you differently they are liars)

If there was ever a time I absolutely positively needed a beer it was right now.