37 Minutes

If you ever wander into an Emergency Department on a slow night you might be tempted to comment on how slow things are to the staff. This comment will, in most instances, result in your being drawn and quartered by the nursing staff and then seriously injured by the physician.

Nurses and Doctors aren’t as a rule superstitious people, but their work comes in unpredictable floods and droughts. Every one of them remembers at lease one time when things were blissfully quiet until some well meaning miscreant commented on how slow things were, whereupon a bus full of hemophiliacs hit a truck loaded with plate glass head-on right out side the ED, or some other unspeakable horror began.

This is the story of one such horror.

I was working at a rural ambulance station that ran, on average, about five calls in a 24-hour shift, and things were slow. By slow I mean we started work at 7AM and by midnight we hadn’t done anything other than check our truck off, eat, sleep, and eat some more. I was talking to a co-worker on the phone when he mentioned that someone in town had worked a "gunshot to the head" call. "Some guys have all the luck", I said and then added "I’ve been on the street for seven years and I’ve never worked a gunshot to the head". These were words I’d live to regret.

I went to bed around 1AM and was awakened at 3AM by the shrill voice of a dispatcher over the radio. (All voices that awaken me at 3AM are, by definition, shrill, and all dispatchers are trained to the doctorate level in how to maximize their own god given shrillness.) "Possible shooting, 14280 NE 165^th Ave. Caller advises the scene is safe." We rolled out of bed and were careening down the road at breakneck speed before we were fully awake. (This is one of several very good reasons to yield with conviction to all emergency vehicles, particularly after midnight.) By some miracle we found the obscure address in the middle of nowhere, a modest house standing alone at the end of a dirt road. We jumped out, grabbed our gear and went inside.

Inside we found a mother in her late 30’s and her two daughters, maybe 8 and 10 years old. Their faces bore tears, terror and disbelief as they anxiously lead us to a back bathroom. We found dad in the shower, sitting on the floor, dead, leaning against the shower wall with most of the former contents of his head dangling toward the floor like thin, gruesome stalactites. A stainless steel revolver lay idle at his feet. The house was quiet for a minute as they waited for me to perform some miracle. It’s a moment I’ll never forget. I didn’t have any miracles.

We confirmed what we all knew with the heart monitor and then turned our attention back to the family. I told mom and the kids that dad was gone and we couldn’t help him. We waited uncomfortably for a few minutes for the police and a counselor to arrive and then quietly picked up our equipment and left.

As we got to the end of the long driveway the dispatcher called us again. "Now what?" I thought as I answered. " Copy another gunshot to the head?" I looked at my partner in disbelief, and then at my watch. It had been 37 minutes since we got the first call. "Is this a joke?" I thought. It wasn’t.

We immediately returned to full speed, this time down a very dark, very thin rural blacktop. The dispatcher wasn’t able to determine from what she was hearing on the phone exactly what was happening. She thought the callers might have loaded the patient into a car and struck out for the hospital on their own. As a result she’s sent two ambulances, up each of their two possible routes to the hospital. After some of our own confusion we figured this out and began looking for the car in question as we drove.

Having sorted all that out I returned my attention to a map book, looking for the address. A second or so after I turned my attention from the windshield my partner suddenly locked the brakes on the ambulance up and we began screaming to a halt. I looked up to see what looked like a body in the road. Things are happening way too fast, I thought. We stopped scant feet from the carcass and just as the ambulance lurched backward from the hard stop the "body", which I’d assumed was our patient left in the road by his panic stricken companions, got up and ran from the road. As he reached the edge of the road he ran full speed into a utility pole and fell to the ground. Dazed, he sat up and shook his head. My partner, ever the pragmatist, rolled down his window. "You okay?" he asked the former corpse. The corpse made a hand gesture that seemed to signal his good health and my partner again applied his full weight to the accelerator. "Probably some drunk who fell asleep in the road" he said. Too stupefied to answer I returned to my map book.

We arrived a few minutes later at a remote singlewide that seemed to have taken years to get to. There were two guys and a girl inside, all of them looked as if they weren’t sure whether to scream, cry or vomit. They were all in their late teen or early 20’s. There were beer cans and a full ashtray on the coffee table, the obvious result of a small party.

The quietest of the three directed us to the kitchen as the girl suddenly screamed "do something!" We found a 19-year-old kid lying face up on the kitchen floor. He’d been shot through both temples. I made a mental note that the gun wasn’t in view and silently hoped that whoever had it wasn’t in the mood to use it on me. I quickly put the thought out of my head. He was breathing shallow, regular breaths. There was blood and some brain matter oozing out the hole in his right temple. His pupils weren’t reactive to light and he didn’t respond to pain at all. The bullet had done catastrophic damage to his brain, but hadn’t destroyed the "vegetative functions" section of his brain. He was brain dead but still alive.

I immediately began working on him. I put a tube in his trachea to protect his airway, started IV’s and we began the long journey to the hospital. When we got to the hospital the kid’s mother was there waiting on us. She talked calmly with us and the Doctor about her son’s condition as we moved him to the hospital’s stretcher. Hers was the first calm voice I’d heard in hours, it seemed. This was to my utter amazement. After she fully understood her son’s condition she suggested organ donation without even being asked. I was nearly moved to tears. At the end of two of the most harrowing hours many people could imagine, I was faced with possibly the strongest, bravest person on the planet. Her son had gotten into an argument with his girlfriend and fueled by alcohol and youthful passion had found a very permanent solution to a temporary problem. He’d shot himself.

His organs were successfully "harvested" and now live on in the bodies of half a dozen people, all of whom owe their lives to an incredible woman that they’ll never meet.

It was, all in all, a completely unbelievable night, and the last one during which I uttered the words "Some guys have all the luck".