The first time I got killed…

It was Christmas morning, my first Christmas working the street as a Paramedic. Things had been deathly quiet all night and my partner and I were amusing ourselves in the wee hours of Christmas morning by playing Frisbee outside when we got a call. Happy that we finally had something to do, we rushed to our ambulance and were off to the call. The call was in an apartment complex, for a cardiac problem. On the way there dispatch told us that another call had come in for an electrical fire in the same complex and that we should be careful.

Dispatchers have a gift for the painfully obvious sometimes. They’re constantly saying things like "There’s a guy with a machine gun in the house, so don’t go in there." When the first part of the sentence would, in most cases, have sufficed. A dispatcher once told me that a car had struck a power pole and that live wires were dancing on the car’s roof. At the end, he added helpfully, "…so don’t touch the car". This they do with our best interests at heart, so we accept these superfluous additional pieces of advice with as much patience as possible.

When we got to the apartment complex, we noticed two very disturbing things. First, the local residents apparently needed a dispatcher’s advice. The idea of not standing in or very near a burning electrical panel had not occurred to them. As we looked on, a breaker exploded out of the flaming electrical box, barely missing the apparently empty heads of the bystanders. Second, the wife of our patient was standing outside (not a good sign) looking at us with panicked helplessness all over her very troubled face (a very bad sign).

The very first rule in the "EMT and Paramedic’s guide to living through your career" is "NEVER get separated from your partner". This, we quickly surmised, was a good time to abandon our good sense and break this most sacred of rules. The dim witted apartment dwellers needed to be directed away from their imminent demise, and the patient we’d been called for was, by the look on his wife’s face, in serious trouble.

Having made this ill-fated decision, I grabbed my heart monitor and "airway bag" which together weighed about fifty pounds. Thus laden I followed the patient’s wife into the apartment.

We entered the apartment and had to take a hard right down a hallway to get to the living room. As I got to the far end of the hall, I heard a sound. The door behind me slammed, hard. My heart sank. That, I thought, was not a good sound. The more sensible part of my psyche begged me not to turn around, but it lost out to more rash voices (again), and I turned around anyway, bumping my baggage into the walls of the narrow hallway as I did.

I should say, at this point that I’m normally not an easy man to intimidate. This is mainly because I’m missing a bit of good sense, but also because I’m 6’6" tall and I weigh about 250 pounds. On this particular evening and at this particular moment I was, in fact, quite intimidated. This was for two reasons. First, the gentleman standing between me and the only way out of this small apartment was bigger than me; taller, and quite a bit more muscular than I am. Second, he was holding a meat cleaver in his hand and looked to be in an extremely bad mood. This, I thought, could become quite serious.

I took quick stock of my situation. I was wearing a fairly heavy coat, which might have offered about a milliseconds worth of protection should my new friend decide to hack me into tiny bits. That was a small comfort. I also had fifty pounds of useless junk in my hands. That would probably slow me down enough to negate any benefit that the jacket might have provided. My final assessment of my situation; I was about to be hurt very badly and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it.

My patient took a step forward, and as he did so something occurred to me. Perhaps, I thought, if I smiled at him in a really friendly way, he wouldn’t hack me to pieces me in the hallway. Not much to go on, really, but as this seemed like the best available option, this is exactly what I did. At that same instant his wife, standing scant inches behind me, screamed at him at the top of her voice. At that moment I’m fairly sure my previously very reliable heart came to a complete stop.

Time froze for a minute, my attacker in mid stride, his gleaming cleaver beginning to rise, me, helpless in an apartment hallway, a stupid grin on my face. "Damn", I thought, "my getting killed today is really going to screw up Christmas."

At that moment things began to turn around. Why, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it was my charming smile; maybe it was a Christmas present from God. Probably it was his wife’s shrill command to "quit actin’ crazy". I don’t know. What I do know is that he stopped and lowered the cleaver. My heart started to beat again, but at about ten times its normal rate, as if to make up for lost time. My cleaver-wielding friend was persuaded to give up his weapon and sit down with me for a chat at the dining room table. My partner strolled in a moment later, happy go lucky as ever, asking what he could do for us. This filled me with an immediate desire to strangle him to death for leaving me alone with this murderous lunatic. Rather that end his life in front of our new company I reminded myself to murder him later and discretely asked him to go find me some police officers, in case our new friend had another mood swing. He quietly retreated outside and returned a moment later with the police.

Our patient, as it turned out, had a fairly healthy drinking habit. This being Christmas, he’d decide that he’d try to kick the habit. While it is overall a good thing to stop drinking, suddenly quitting the bottle after long abuse leads to a litany of short term physiological problems, one of which is "the DT’s". DT’s are delirium tremors, a severe electrolyte imbalance caused by the change of habit that causes the person to see things that aren’t there, snakes in this case, and in some cases have seizures. Our patient was chasing the snakes around the house with the cleaver when I arrived, and lucky for me I didn’t look like a snake (must have been the smile).

We transported him safely to the hospital without any more trouble. There, on turning my deluded friend over to the nurse on duty, I found a nice quiet room to hide in and had a small, private nervous break down. The Christmas celebration I had with my family a few days later was the best I’d had in years. There’s nothing quite like nearly getting hacked to death to make you appreciate the holidays.

In the years that followed I had dozens of opportunities to leave my partner’s side to seek fame and glory. I passed on every single one.