IMPATIENS, Part II
“Jesus,” Rob said. We sat forward in our seats. “This is the real deal. That’s an air tube. See. There’s the bag.”
The other two paramedics were coming back from the ambulance with duffel bags full of equipment that they laid around my tree. I had dug a flower bed around this burr oak, red and white impatiens sticking up out of a layer of cedar mulch. The sapling looked insignificant in comparison to the paramedics. Its foliage seemed so paltry. I hadn’t noticed how short the tree was when I was working the soil, kneeling in the dirt.
As they began CPR, we could see the old man’s head jerk from the van doorway when the paramedics did chest compressions. It looked like someone was shaking the life out of him. He was an older man with a full head of white hair. The skin on his face was transparent like the flimsy outside of a rotten tomato. His mouth hung open.
“It’s best to have four people to go at a guy like this,” Rob continued. “It’ll wear out two people if they have to do it alone.”
The paramedic who was doing compressions moved off, stepping onto the grass to look in one of the bags.
Rob moved to the edge on the porch, sitting on the front steps. I preferred to stand. The way they were going at the old guy, I couldn’t imagine him lasting much longer. The police had arrived to direct traffic, rerouting the backed-up cars onto a side-street.
“He found what he was looking for,” Rob said, motioning toward the paramedic digging out and ripping open a plastic bag from the duffel bag next to my tree. “Adrenaline. Big needle.”
“What are they going to do with that?” I asked, leaning against the rail. The sight of the needle made me sick to my stomach. “Are they going to jump-start his heart?”
“That’s right,” Rob said. “They need such a long syringe because it has to puncture the breast plate. If that doesn’t help, there isn’t much hope.”
The head paramedic got back onto the van, stepping carefully with the syringe out in front of him, then disappeared inside, below the windows where we couldn’t see him. The other paramedics stopped for a minute, looking to their captain hopefully, before continuing with compressions.
I didn’t know for sure, but the adrenaline didn’t appear to work. It had been five, ten minutes since the ambulance had arrived. It had been a while. There didn’t seem to be any hope for the old guy at all.
“They can still defib,” Rob said, “but that’s always risky in the field. Nobody likes playing around with that much current outside a controlled environment.”
The fourth paramedic pulled the ambulance closer and took a back board from the vehicle. They slid the board under the old man, lifting his body carefully in segments to ease it under him. His head went last, as we could clearly see, the air tube taped to the side of his face.
When the paramedics pulled him out of the van they laid him on a stretcher, fastening him down with thick straps. The man’s chest wasn’t rising, but they’d stopped resuscitation. His stomach was distended. The skin on his torso was red—blood rushing to the surface. There were bruises all over his body. He was so old anyway. They put another tube down his throat, this one to siphon the air out of his stomach, Rob said.
They all but destroyed the impatiens around my tree. The stalks were broken, the red and white flowers crumbled in the tore up mulch. The tree looked like it was fine.
As we watched the paramedics work, the girls came out of the house laughing, fresh glasses of lemoncello on the serving tray. Carolyn shot me a look of concern when I turned to look at them, her face frozen in the remnants of laughter. She asked what was going on.
“This man is dying,” Rob explained, standing up on the steps with his hands on his hips. His back was turned to the street. He nodded to the girls, then sat back down on the steps. “They’ve been trying to save him.”
Carolyn set the tray of drinks down next to my empty chair. I walked over and put my hand on her shoulder, telling her what she had missed.
“The driver did CPR?” Adrienne asked, walking across the porch to sit next to Rob. She slumped into him, looking confused. She laid her head on Rob’s arm and then raised it again.
A couple of the neighborhood teenagers came down the sidewalk on their bikes, but the stretcher was in their way. They rolled around for a few seconds before slouching on the bikes. Watching from up close, they lit cigarettes and asked the paramedics questions we couldn’t hear. No one was doing compressions then.
“Why didn’t you help them?” Adrienne asked Rob, pulling his elbow into her stomach. “You know CPR.”
“I would have,” he said, turning to her, “if I knew what was happening earlier.” Rob was blushing through his tan. “The driver didn’t ask for help. If I’d have known what was going on, I could have done something.”
By this time the paramedics were wheeling the old man towards the ambulance, huddled around the stretcher, each of them securing a different implement as their feet shuffled with choreographed precision. The captain trailed behind them, talking on a hand-held radio. They lifted the old man into the back of the ambulance and jumped in behind him after packing up their duffle bags.
“Why did they stop?” Carolyn asked, looking at Rob. “Why did they give up?”
“They’ll start again. You have to keep doing CPR until you get to the hospital. A paramedic can’t declare a person dead. Only doctors can do that.”
“I see.”
“We had a boy once, he was face down in a pool for an hour before they found him, but we still had to try until he was in the ER. Didn’t make too much sense.”
“You should always try,” Carolyn said. She gave Adrienne a sympathetic look, pulling herself tighter into my mid-section. “You never know. Miracles can happen.”
“On the news, they’ll just say the patient is in extremely critical condition,” Rob continued, as if Carolyn had said nothing, a touch of the macabre easing naturally into his voice. “Extremely critical means they’re dead.”
Some of the neighbors went back inside as the ambulance restarted its sirens and drove off. The police scattered after making sure traffic was flowing again. This wasn’t such a bad neighborhood, but the houses around ours were breaking down. They were mostly rentals. There were loose grocery bags in the bushes and their cars leaked oil onto unpaved driveways.
I walked down to where they tried to save the old man’s life. A few of my flowers wouldn’t grow back, but nothing was really beyond repair. I stuffed the plastic bags the paramedics had left behind into my pocket and walked back up to the porch.
We were drinking lemoncello, standing around on the porch, but it took a while before anyone spoke again. It was beginning to get dark outside. The air was so dry it tasted like dust.
“The first time I did CPR,” Rob said, standing up from the steps to face the porch, “I quit right away.”
“Why was that?” I asked, looking at Adrienne. Carolyn and I sat back down on the lawn chairs, touching fingers with our hands that weren’t holding a drink.
“The guy’s ribs were breaking. It scared the shit out of me.”
“That’s gross, sweetie.” Adrienne slouched on the porch steps. She put her hand to her head, rubbing the shape out of her hair. Looking back years later, it was easy to see why Rob and Adrienne never worked out.
“CPR is rough on a body,” Rob said. He stepped closer to Adrienne, speaking a little louder than he probably needed to. He was spilling his drink. “Look at those EMTs. They’re huge. It’s like four gym rats beating up on you. Beating up on a little guy. A sick guy in bad shape. But it takes a lot to put life back into a body. It’s what has to happen.”
“We don’t need the commentary,” Adrienne said. “We saw what happened.”
“That old guy looked like he weighed three hundred pounds, but it’s just swelling. He’s probably only a buck-fifty, but he doesn’t look it now. There is so much water in the body, and blood that’s stirred up; it has to go somewhere.”
“Stop it,” Adrienne snapped. “You’re making me sick.”
“Thanks, Rob,” I said. “It’s interesting, but she’s probably right.”
“What is it?” he asked Adrienne, noticing that she had started to sniffle.
“Leave me alone. It’s a fucking shame to see someone die.”
“Give me a break. People die every day. Men are stabbed in drug deals. Babies are roasted in cars. Even in boring cow-town Lincoln this stuff happens.”
“Lay off,” Carolyn said. “It’s a bad way for a man to die. It’s not just that he’s dying. It’s how it’s happening.”
“Name me a good death,” Rob responded flippantly, lighting another cigarette, staring down my wife. “They sugar-coat it as much as possible.”
“Rob,” I interrupted, “you’re spilling your lemoncello.”
“This was bad,” Adrienne said through dry sobs. She stood and walked up the steps to the porch landing. “Those punks smoking cigarettes on their bikes, watching him. You didn’t even try to help him. No one’s sugar-coating it.”
Rob swallowed his lemoncello Toschi, then chased it with the one Adrienne had left. Carolyn handed him the lemoncello she’d been holding in her lap and he drank it too. I lit a Dunhill.
“He wasn’t even dead yet,” Carolyn said, rising to stand next to a column. “He looked like he could still be moving when they loaded him into the ambulance.”
“He was dead,” Rob said, settling back on the steps with his cigarette. “The dead have a certain color. This guy had it.”
