Firefighter With A Frozen Heart

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With that, three different people produced a variety of types, and Jess chose the low dose, then popped it into the man’s mouth. “Chew it up, Frank, and swallow it.”

The man did, with great difficulty. “Am I going to be okay, Doc?” he forced out.

Doc. It had been a long time since anybody had called him that. Strange how it sounded. Kind of nice, though. “We’re doing our best, Frank. Right now, we’re going to get you stabilized, then send you to the hospital, where they’ll be able to run tests to see exactly what’s going on.” “My wife,” Frank gasped.

“I called her,” Julie said, stepping up with an oxygen mask. “She’s going to meet you in the emergency room.” With that, Julie placed the mask on his face, then whispered to Jess, “It’s low, ninety over sixty.” After which she immediately set about the task of finding a vein in Frank’s arm and inserting an IV catheter. “You’re going to feel a little stick,” she said, as the needle slid in as smooth as melted butter. She glanced over at Frank, saw that he didn’t respond, not even a tiny flinch to being stuck, and she nudged Jess, who was busy hooking EKG leads to Frank’s chest. “I think Frank, here, is on the verge of taking a little nap.”

“Frank!” Jess shouted, giving him a little shake. “Wake up, can you hear me?”

Franks’s eyes fluttered open.

“Do you have any history of heart disease?”

“No,” he sputtered. “Healthy …”

“Ever had chest pains that you can remember?”

This time Frank didn’t respond. Rather, he stared up at the ceiling.

“Come on, Frank,” Julie said, slapping him on the wrist, trying to stimulate him back into paying attention. “Stay with us, okay? We need you to try hard and answer the questions Dr. Corbett is asking you. It’s important.”

Frank nodded, but didn’t look away from the ceiling, and it appeared he was having difficulty even doing that. Jess gave a nod to Julie who, without asking, knew to get the defibrillator ready, just in case. She was impressive, taking his nonverbal cues, setting out drugs that might have to be administered, getting the endotracheal tube and laryngoscope ready. It’s what she did in the normal course of her day, and what Jess used to do, too. But somehow, seeing Julie work the way she did knotted his gut. She was so … good. So confident. She’d gone so far beyond anything she’d ever thought she could be back in the days when she’d wanted him. Good for her, he thought. She did better than anything I could have ever been for her.

“Frank, you’re having a cardiac episode … heart attack,” Jess explained. “Are you on any kind of medication, for any condition?”

The man shook his head, a wobbly, feeble attempt at it, but the effort was more than he was able to endure, and his eyes dropped shut. “Damn,” Jess snapped, immediately scrambling into assessment mode, trying to locate a pulse. Which he did, thankfully. “Weak,” he said. “Respirations getting more shallow, quite a bit more labored, too.” Meaning Frank was winding down. “Julie, could you check his blood pressure again? I have an idea it’s dropped.”

She did, then tried a second time. “Not hearing it,” she said, pumping up the blood-pressure cuff a third time, on this attempt feeling the pressure with her fingertips. “Palp at fifty,” she finally said.

“So when can we get him transported?” The three or four minutes they’d been working on the man seemed like an eternity, and the thing was, in the field there was little or nothing they could do for him unless, God forbid, he crashed. Which was getting perilously close to being the case. But in even the most scantily equipped hospital, which he hoped his hospital was not, there was a world of options and miracles that would save Frank’s life, once they got him through the door.

“Someone, check on transport,” Julie shouted to the three or four people in the cabin who seemed to have no function other than wait. “Go find Will Brassard, the fire chief, and tell him we’ve got a patient we’ve got to get out of here right now!”

“Big voice,” Jess commented, plowing through the kit containing the cardiac meds. He wanted something to kickstart the heart in case it decided to stop, and he found it in the form of a tiny vial of epinephrine. “Don’t remember that on you before.”

“That’s because it’s an acquired talent. I had to work on it. Bad patients in the back of my ambulance need a big voice sometimes. Patients like you were.”

He chuckled. “So you took shouting lessons?”

“Something like that. Part of some assertiveness training Grace had me take.”

“Money well spent,” he said. “You’re about as assertive as anybody I’ve ever known.”

“In a good way?” she asked, taking the vial from Jess and drawing the liquid into a syringe, getting ready to act.

“In a good way.” A very good way.

“They’re ready to take him,” one of the volunteers called from the door. “And they said to tell you they’re bringing in a critical from the kitchen right now.”

It was almost an amazing switch. As one Frank Thomas was carried out the door to the nearest ambulance, one Randolph O’Neal was rushed in and deposited in the very same bed Frank had just vacated. Only, right off the bat, both Jess and Julie saw the grim prognosis for the restaurant’s sous chef. He was burned extensively on his legs, shoulders and chest, a combination of second- and third-degree burns. His breathing was raspy, gurgly. He wasn’t conscious. He also had a gaping, bleeding head wound. “I need saline,” Jess shouted, then looked at Julie. For a moment they exchanged knowing glances … glances that spoke volumes in the span of a fractured second.

“I’ll get a helicopter in,” Julie said.

Jess, already in assessment mode looking for pupillary reaction in the man, simply nodded, already seeing the bleak reality. Unfortunately, the bleakness was only confirmed when Jess pried open O’Neal’s eyelids, flashed his penlight, saw fixed, dilated pupils. No reaction to light. “Nothing,” he said, cursing under his breath and at the same time, strapping a blood-pressure cuff on Randolph’s arm.

Julie didn’t even bother asking what it was because, judging from the grim expression on Jess’s face, it wasn’t good.

“Oxygen, IV, saline for the burns …” he said, on a frustrated sigh. “You know the drill.”

Julie immediately turned to the group of bystanders, all but one of whom had gone out the door when Randolph O’Neal had come in. “You got any kind of medic training?” she asked the boy, who appeared to be a busser at the restaurant.

“No, ma’am. Except I can do that squeeze thing if somebody’s choking.”

“Can you pour liquid over this man’s burns?”

“Yes, ma’am. I can do that.”

And just like that, Julie had recruited a volunteer who stepped forward to assume an important part of their patient’s treatment.

“Got a broken leg,” someone shouted from the door.

That someone turned out to be Rafe, who was leading the way for two firefighters carrying yet another patient on a stretcher.

“It’s about time you showed up,” Jess quipped.

“Well, I’ll be damned. You’re the medic in charge?” Rafe asked.

“I’m the medic in charge, which means you take the broken leg because …” He looked back at his patient. Didn’t finish his sentence as Randolph O’Neal’s breathing had just gone agonal … into near-death mode. Rafe must have seen the same thing, as he tried stepping between his brother and O’Neal.

“Look, you don’t need this right now, okay? You take the guy we just brought in and I’ll deal with this.”

“Because I can’t?” Jess snapped.

“Because you shouldn’t.” Rafe stepped up, took Jess by the arm, tried to move him. “Jess, his pupils are blown,” Rafe whispered. “He’s not going to make it. Not to a hospital, not anywhere.”

“I don’t give up on my patients, Rafe,” Jess growled, bending down over the man.

“Jess,” Julie said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Rafe is right. We can’t … There’s nothing …”

A hush fell over the cabin as the inevitability became apparent to everybody there, and within seconds the cabin cleared of everybody but Jess, Julie, Rafe, the two patients and James Orser, the young man who was still, dutifully, dousing Randolph O’Neal’s chest with saline, even as O’Neal exhaled his final breath.