Wendy

Most of the time when we saw Wendy, she was either seizing or post-ictal, a fancy word they thought up for the state people are in just following a seizure. There are no weird muscular movements, but people can't talk very well, they drool a lot, sometimes they fight you, spit at you, bite you, or other sexy things. Usually they thank you later for beating their ass and making them get in the ambulance. Unless they happen to be a drunk.

I worked in neurology for awhile, and when I worked in genetics, my study was on seizure meds during pregnancy. I also had a roommate once with epilepsy, so I had seen a few seizures. Sometimes it made me think that if I had some really terrible seizures, i'd probably drink a lot too. You start to feel bad, like the Cambridge do-gooders, cell phones at the ready to alert us to these horrific looking spasms. Then you remember the basic medicine of the whole thing. Wendy and her friends didn't start out with epilepsy and then become drunks. They have seizures anytime their body withdraws from alcohol, and likely would never have had a seizure in their life if they weren't such rancid alcoholics. The sheer volume of listerine they ingest can't really improve matters.

Wendy reportedly has a trust fund with lots of money in it. She also has medicaid. She lives at one of the local shelters, funded by a college in order to decrease the number of gross bums most people have to see in a given day. All of their residents have substance abuse problems to ice the cakes of their problematic existance. It's not a generalization, it's a fact; if you don't have a substance abuse problem, you have to find somewhere else to stay.

I'm not sure what to tell about Wendy first. If the overarching point is that she is really gross, there's no shortage of stuff to tell. She had blackheads the size of Florida, and if you had to touch her head, sometimes they would squirt out. When she gets her period, it's au natural. The mess was semi-disposable, since she usually wore hospital scrubs, as she spent all her time in the hospital anyway. Not admitted there, just in the er. She did get admitted once- for butt rot. Her ass literally started to fall off. They weren't sure weather she got frostbite from being outside (she came in to the er one afternoon at 84 core degrees), or if she just passed out somewhere and basically got a bedsore. We all laugh at bedsores, but they killed superman. Either way, she had a large chunk of decaying, gangrenous flesh, otherwise known to those of us who try to talk about it without wretching, as necrosis. They had to remove this black, stinking cavern of decaying ass flesh to save her miserable life.

Most often, Wendy got up in the morning at the shelter and walked (I am still amazed that she could, even semi-sober) to the liquor store to stock up for the day, then drank to oblivia until she couldn't walk, which was her usual state of affairs. If anything went awry with that plan, and she didn't get her booze, she had seizures on the street, however far down she got. This was actually worse for her than if she managed to get drunk. Drunk, you just fall once. Seizures make you fall then shake around, and bounce your head off a myriad of people, and objects, including mudpuddles, railroad tracks, cement, doors, benches, moving buses, children, or anything else that gets in the way. If things fell into place for her, we didn't hear from her until 11am or noon. Then someone called because she was a) face down in the mud, or b) face down on the road with a bus coming, or c) in a place of buisness of any sort.

One day we get the call- 620 Mass Ave or so- female, in her 40's, down. We knew it was her, so we didn't rush. That crying wolf thing is true. My partner and I had a third rider that day, a buddy that had done the emt class with me, but wasn't working yet. Sort of an observer. We hadn't had anything to observe all day. We crawled through harvard square at a breakneck 15 mph or so, avoiding pedestrians and cars who didn't stop. We got the radio update, "7- you know who it is- she isn't breathing well the good sams say." The good sams- those damn samaratans with their cell phones... I pressed ahead, the engine roared, and the needle almost hit 20.

"Received," I said tiredly to the radio, pushing the button to transmit without taking the hand piece off the dash. To the third, I said, "you ready to see some real action?" I hoped the sarcasm carried.

As we hopped out and I told the guys to grab the bags, however, I could see a very purple arm sticking out of the crowd of people around her. Crowd? Weird- even most of the good sams know Wendy. But it was her- eyes rolled back in her head, one blue and one brown, one pupil blown already from god knows what, shirt fallen up so as to show the giant scar where they once actually bothered to operate on her after a bad bout with her chronic pancreatitis. Chest not moving. Color poor. "Wendy- wake the fuck up," I yelled, shocking those around her who had never seen anyone wake up a bum. I pressed hard in the middle of her chest, and dragged knuckles over her sternum, but didn't get a response. My partner and the third rider looked at me, having trouble getting through the crowd that seemed to grow continuously. I grabbed the blue bag- the main supplies- and ordered them to grab the stretcher. With one hand, I started getting the bag ready that you inflate a dead person's lungs with, and with the other, i pressed transmit on my portable radio to call for a second truck. I pressed the mask to Wendy's sad little face- the same lips that some of my colleagues had found in an atm alcove around a number of homeless guy's less-than-private parts when she ran low on cash- and forced air into her pathetic lungs. Blackheads oozed under the pressure of the mask and the force of the oxygen-enriched air.

The boys appeared and hauled her into the back, the other truck arrived, and gave us a bunch of shit for putting any effort into saving the bacteria-laden waste of life, and we got her to the hospital in plenty of time for them to save her filthy ass. Around the same time, another medic truck pulled in with a 47 year old father in cardiac arrest, non-salvageable, whose 7 or 8 year old kid stood outside the code room yelling to everyone and no one, "help my daddy! please, help my daddy!"

I washed my hands and grabbed gear to restock my truck, kicking Wendy the cockroach on the way out. She was eating a tuna sandwich before I could get back out the door.