The tones drop: “Remington Fire Department to the intersection of 5th and Archer for the car crashed into a pole.”
It’s three in the morning. Tones for a car accident at three in the morning mean only a handful of things: drunk drivers, stolen cars, terrible traumas. Fuckin’ losers.
Tonight, I’m partnered with someone who doesn’t drive. That’s why I’m awake when the tones go out. Our ambulance is one minute away from the intersection. I click my tongue as I close tonight’s tactic for mindfulness and therapy: a coloring book of flowers. A case of colored pencils is stuffed back into my backpack, and then I reach for the traffic vest behind my seat and buckle up before I push the gas.
Surely, as I pull around the corner, there is the pole with a black sedan rammed into the base of it, the hood crumpled and scrunched down the middle. The windshield is a glittering mess of broken glass. Both front doors are thrown wide open and I can see the airbags deployed in the driver’s and passenger’s seats, but there’s no one in the car. I’m relieved.
When I key up to dispatch, I tell them the situation is mild.
“We’re on a scene Fire and PD. One sedan versus a pole. Moderate damage, airbags deployed. Everyone is out.”
Hi, police department… I think as I step out of the ambulance and start walking towards the half-dozen officers on scene. My head shifts around looking for the patients. One of the firefighters points towards a cop standing with two boys. Literal boys. When I see their hands in cuffs, my brow furrows with confusion.
“Officer,” I start to ask. “Where are the passengers of that vehicle?”
He hooks a thumb to the pair of teenagers, and chuckles.
I turn my head back to look, again, at the car. It’s still wrapped around the pole.
No fuckin’ way. I’m incredulous at the though that these kids caused that car crash and got out unscathed.
Memories of another night stampede through my head: a teenage girl, the same age as my sister, holding the hand of her abusive, upset boyfriend as he runs into the street and directly into the path of innocent driver who couldn’t have seen it coming until her hood is dented and broken windshield covering the asphalt at 3am, just like the couple– his scalp split open and two broken legs which will probably never be able to run again, arterial blood spraying out of her open humeral fracture and onto the boots of a well-prepared police officer as he cranks his aid kit’s tourniquet.
My preceptor tells me I looked like a deer in headlights when I confusingly fumbled out of the ambulance they forgot me inside and into the hoard of paramedics and police that night. I wonder what I look like reliving that scene over and over again in my sleep or the quiet moments of my day, like washing the dishes or trying to remember what it feels like to breathe without focusing on the feeling of my breath through my nostrils and into heaving lungs set on fire with panic. I figure I look like a mess when my knees buckle and my legs give out under me, letting my small figure fall onto the floor, sobbing alone, water falling over the soapy plates as I’m assaulted by my memories, forced to relive the worst I’ve ever seen and felt.
As quick as the flashback comes, it goes, and the high pitch whine of terror in my head changes into the low drone of my pulse in my eardrums until the sound of a young police officer’s voice comes to my attention.
“They went on a joyride,” he explains, “ and they’re both minors.”
Great, I think before annoyance over the whole scene creeps up my back.
Minors can’t sign a refusal for transport to the hospital, and that they went on a joy ride and are wearing cuffs means they are in police custody, which means that tonight the ambulance is the taxi to the emergency department. That’s all the explanation I can will myself to understand because, when I get the boys into the ambulance, I’m becoming increasingly overwhelmed with anger I can’t condense.
I gesture towards the bench seat for the pair to park themselves as my partner takes their information. Tonight, he is on paper work and I am taking vitals, doing interventions and driving, each useless call making me feel more and more like a taxi.
For each boy, I lay a hand on their wrist to check his pulses, strong with youth and adrenaline, their blood pressures in normal limits. Neither complains of anything when asked, and they don’t have any visible injuries on exam besides a scrapped palm and knee. When I ask about the abrasions, the more rowdy, or stupid– I can’t tell, of the two points his nose at the officer outside the ambulance, and says, “That motha’fucka did it when he tackled me.”
My anger at the boys crackles under my skin.
“You watch your mouth!” I snap into his face, one foot away from mine as he sits on the bench and I on the stretcher.
With that phrase, one more straw goes on the back of the camel that is going to break with how old I feel.
I’m twenty, I remind myself. Twenty years under my petite belt, three months under my medic license. I’m still so young, so why do these kids look like little boys? Why do I feel so old?
I sigh, and continue to look over the boys for anything that might make this call not feel like such a test of my patience but more a challenge for my skills as a paramedic. No IVs for these guys. No backboards. No splints. Just stupidity, scraped palms, and rashes from where the airbags hit the boys in their young faces. They don’t even have acne.
Tonight, it’s just my anger multiplying.
“You have glass in your hair,” I note, monotone and dull, with matching blinks of boredom to stifle my anger.
You know… from where the windshield broke as you crashed the car you stole.
Each boy bends forward and tries to dislodge large grains of glass out of his think, short, tightly coiled hair with the one free hand that isn’t cuffed to the railing of the stretcher mounted on the floor. With a soft hand, I help them, and when it is over and I look into their eyes and share with them one of my calmer thoughts, as opposed to the others which are to yell into the vast nothingness of a sky with no stars because of light pollution, or to kick the tires and double over with screams of rage.
The extent to which I’m angry is starting to confuse me. Where did all this come from. Surely, these two kids couldn’t have caused me to be this mad.
“You guys were lucky tonight,” I say.
The one I told to watch his mouth hasn’t taken my advice and continues to answer me as if I was talking with him instead of to him. He huffs with arrogance earned from living in one of the shittier suburbs of the large city bordering the town we are in. Us and the busted car stolen for a joy ride and into a stationary pole at 3 am. Stupid idiot.
“It ain’t shit, man,” he says.
I lunge my torso from the hips at the back-talker, and snap “I am not your fucking ‘man’!” through clenched and bared teeth into his face.
He clamps his mouth shut and I hear his teeth click before I decide I’m fed up.
I toss the band-aids into his face, get up and hop out of the back doors of the ambulance. Then, I slam them shut. The thud the doors make matches the knocking I feel inside my chest from my heart beating like a feral, taunted animal.
A huff of breath out of my hot lungs doesn’t make me feel better. Neither does pulling long sighs and shaking my head. Definitely, walking over to the busted sedan and pulling on the seat belts doesn’t help. Having them come with me as I tug downwards on them throws kerosine on an already flaming anger.
When a car gets into an accident and the airbags deploy, mechanisms in the seat belts snap to tension and lock the seat belts in place. They dangle, limp and lifeless, when unclipped or sometimes cut, to get to their passenger, unless they weren’t being used.
They didn’t even wear their seat belts.
I huff and grumble as I walk towards the driver’s seat of the ambulance and grip the steering wheel with white knuckles.
The drive to the hospital is slow. I take no rush since neither of the boys are hurt except for their pride. I don’t want to lose the police car following us either.
The ambulance bay shelters me from the wind but not the cold as I open the back doors to the ambulance. The officer briefly unhandcuffs the boys from the railing of the stretcher mounted to the floor only to then handcuff the boys to each other.
“You serious, man?” the loudmouth of the pair asks with disappointment. Here, another wound to his fragile masculinity.
For a moment, I’m relieved of the hot anger that throbs behind my sternum, and a bright laugh bubbles out of me.
“That’s cute,” I comment.
“Friendship bracelets,” says the officer.
A nurse guides the pair, my partner behind them and then the officer and I, still chuckling, to the room at the end of the ED reserved for either psychiatric evaluations, violent patients, or those in police custody. My partner gives the nurse a report outside of the room, and inside there is nothing but a gurney, dumb-and-dumber, the officer, and myself. Myself and my exponentially growing rage.
I’ve stopped laughing now, and the tension in my neck reminds me why I’m so angry.
My mother has a pressure cooker with a metal top that hisses and rocks back and forth when the inside is hot enough. Bursts of steam would shoot out of it with every oscillation. I was absolutely amazed by it as a child but never understood the danger of the pressure trying to explode behind it or the burning heat contained inside. One time I tried to play with the top, which looked like a toy shuttling back and forth. My mother yelled at me, and I never tried to lay my hands on that pot again.
Tonight, I feel like that pot. My hands would shake if they weren’t balled into my front pockets to prevent me from battering the next person to slight me in the smallest way.
No one in the room speaks, and yet there is the shrillest noise in my ears.
I look at the officer and then to the kids. My mouth feels dry, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it before I start letting go on the grip pining the anger inside me to the back of my ribs. With a calmness mustered by the strength of God, I ask the officer how old he thinks the boys are.
He’s going to be here for the night, probably after his shift is over because he will have to wait for his relief, and the annoyance works its way into a wrinkle on his forehead.
“Fourteen and fifteen,” he answers. I’m sure he took their birthdays for the police report.
These boys are fourteen and fifteen years old. My pulse throbs between my ears.
Because he is clearly socially deviant and stupid, the one who keeps talking back dares to include himself in the conversation I’ve begun with the officer. Clearly, he doesn’t see the rage I feel lighting up my body.
I snap my face towards him as if to say ,“You shut the fuck up! Right now!” His recoil shows me he understands.
“They’re both fourteen,” I say. I know how old they are. I heard their birthdays, but hearing someone else state the fact of their ages makes me feel disconnected.
“So you lied to me?” the officer spits back at the kids. It’s well into 4 am, and I feel the weariness of the hour behind the fizz of my anger.
The kids are now shouting over each other at the officer. “We ain’t lied to no one!“ and, “You didn’t listen to us!”
Shut the fuck up, you handcuffed little shits.
“They’re fourteen,” I shout to no one in particular inside these barren walls. “They told me. Look at them.”
I wave my hand at the pair and wonder if they’ve ever been yelled at before, or if their stupid actions of the night are the result of a lack of authority figures in their life. Either way, the hold on my anger has become so weak that my voice is heavy, as opposed to its usual shrill when I get charged about something.
I snap back to the kids, sitting on each side of the end of the gurney. Their feet dangle, and I continue.
“Anyway, I don’t give a shit. You guys are 14! I have brothers and sisters your age!”
“They don’t care!” the officer tries to tell me. In this moment, my frustration is obvious to the officer, and he fades away into the background as I start to pour out my rage.
“You guys are fourteen?” I ask in a quiet anger now, which is a dangerous level of mad, and I’m scared at how calm I sound. I look to the corner of the room, click my tongue, and continue.
“You guys are fourteen, and you guys are lucky.” The hardened walls I built around myself are coming down now. My nostrils are flared, and I’m pointing with the gesticulation of anger and firm conviction I was raised with.
“You know who else is lucky? Me. I’m lucky.” My finger point to my chest, and it feels sharp enough to ground me to this room instead of flying off at the handle.
I see the kids look at me, confused. The “how is this about you, lady?” remains unspoken.
“I got lucky today. You know why? I got lucky today because I didn’t have to pick up bits of your bodies off the road tonight.”
Here it is. You’re gonna learn today, assholes.
“Little bits… of your face, of your brain, of your skin from that road. That much blood, that smell, it stays in your nose for the rest of the day.”
The loudmouth stays quiet, and his friend’s eyes go big with the shock of my words. If only you knew, kid, how fucking lucky you are.
“I don’t care what you wanna do with your lives. I don’t care what you do in the middle of the night. You wanna go steal cars? Go steal cars! I couldn’t give a single shit about you guys!”
I see the officer shift in the corner of my vision and can feel his disbelief that I have the balls to talk about these poorly kept secret thoughts of public servers.
This is the shit we "don’t take home.” I take it home, and fuck you if you honestly think you don’t. We all take it home, either with the bottle, ruined relationships, or broken sleep, wracked with nightmares or imaginary tones going off. Maybe we just hate ourselves instead of the world. Maybe it’s the anger that doubles every minute, like a structure fire, inside our veins– inside me right now.
“But don’t think for a single moment you guys are sitting here because you’re not lucky! Lucky that you stole a car in the middle of the night. Lucky that you guys were driving when no one else was driving either! Lucky that you crashed where no one was standing because it’s night time and people went home! You could have killed someone else! You could have killed each other! You wanna kill yourselves? Fine! Go ahead! But how dare you put yourselves someplace where other people choose to exist!”
“I’m a kid! You guys are fourteen, so you’re babies! I’m young, and I want to live a happy life!” That thought echoes in my head: I’m young, and I want to live a happy life!
I could be crying right now. I’m already shattering, and there’s nothing I feel like holding back.
“I don’t need to have nightmares about picking you guys up off the road! I don’t need to see your face when I go to sleep! I don’t want to be forced to remember your face because of the horrible things that happen to your bodies when they go flying through a windshield! And, God forbid it doesn’t look like these faces I’m yelling at right now!”
Everyone in the room is still, but me. I feel like I could shoot through the roof of this hospital.
“I don’t need to look at my brothers and sisters and be reminded of you!”
I’m so fucking done with everything right now. Fuck these kids. Fuck this call. Fuck this shift, this job. Fuck all of this!
I spit out the next sentences and hope to them they feels like nails from a gun, into their coffins for their stupidity, or into their hearts.
“You guys got lucky tonight, and the thing about luck– it runs out.”
My head is roaring by the end of my tirade. If the room had a door, I would have slammed it shut and stomped away, but as I turn away from the boys and storm out of the room, my eyes, probably bloodshot with fury catch a glimpse of the police officer. I hear him say something in approval of my rant, my lecture– the absolute unburdening myself. “Good for you!” or “That’s how it’s done!”
You can shut the fuck up, too, I scoff.
The place where I was dense with exasperation feels hollow now. I’m tiered, both emotionally for this call and for the hours dragging through dregs of this shift.
I wash my hands at the nurse’s station and refuse to look at myself in the mirror that is the aluminum of the napkin dispenser. Rage burns, and it is ugly, and I don’t need to deal with the image of my own anger right now. I can’t. Tonight, I am barely keeping myself glued together.
I grab a glass of ice water and down it in breathless gulps. I refill my, chomping on ice cubes, and fill another cup with water for the police officer in some form of bribery for him to both stay quiet about my unraveling, and to thank him for being there despite it all. Going back to that room feels like taking paces through thick mud.
When I show through the doorway, the loudmouth refuses to look at me, and the other only makes brief eye contact as I enter the room. I’m sure if either had tested me, I would have lunged at them and absolutely lost my resolution against physical violence, probably my job and clean record on top of that.
I give the officer the water with a shaking hand, a residue of my emotions. He seems thankful. I think we both understand how I felt tonight. Maybe, we both are in the same place: in our twenties, in a job we wanted and trained for, absolutely taken back with the shock of scenes we never expected and the incapability to handle everything at once. How does one learn how to take in all the good, the bad, the trauma, the excitement, the exhaustion when it clatters down like the spray of a fire hydrant?
“What time is your shift over?” I ask. I don’t know why I’m striking a conversation. I think it is because I don’t want him to think I’m crazy. I am crazy.
“Seven,” he replies. “You?”
“Six. I’m getting out before you.”
Maybe I’ll get out of it all… just quit all this ‘paramedic’ bullshit.
I go back to the ambulance, stuff my body in the front seat with my knees pulled up and braced in-between by ribcage and the steering wheel. I return to my coloring book and wait for my partner to finish report so I can get the fuck out of this place.
Today, luck feels a lot like an electric whip of anger.
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