Almost immediately after receiving our job for an “unconscious in front of a deli”, another call went out to a different unit, alleging that a person with “severe abdominal pain” was on the same corner. Two more ambulances and a fire truck were dispatched to a “Cardiac Arrest” at an address with cross streets strongly implying that they too were headed towards the same intersection.

The EMS equivalent of the Cavalry converged upon that one corner, which had a large deli at its crossroads. A disheveled man was sitting outside on an overturned milk crate. He had a dirty beard and the clear flask of a well-known brand of vodka dangled, somewhat, out of his jacket pocket. Though he glanced at us when we arrived, he made no effort to flag us down. The man was very much awake and seemed to be comfortable. We all assumed he was probably the intended target of all these 911 calls; people often call for strangers who have no idea that someone thought they were in need of emergency care. But we made a good effort to check around and inside the store to make sure there wasn’t someone else, someone with a true emergency, in need of medical personnel.

The man became angry with our efforts to locate patients who might have matched the medical complaints we had been summoned for (seizing, unconscious, and/or in cardiac arrest) and finally announced that he had called 911, not just once, but several times, for himself. He berated our unprofessional-ism for not recognizing that his non-distressed demeanor and lack of effort in announcing himself obviously meant that he was the person in cardiac arrest/having a seizure/experiencing severe abdominal pains.

“I hadda call THREE times! Three! It took you guys almost FIVE minutes. What if this was an emergency?”

“So you’re admitting this isn’t an emergency needing an ambulance?” we asked.

He backtracked a little. “Well, it most certainly IS an emergency. But not the dying kind.”

We let the other crews, who were getting off duty shortly, know that we could probably handle this medical enigma on our own. They thanked us and wished us luck.

The man walked over to our ambulance carrying a large plastic shopping bag that he was very protective of. A diverse bouquet of pungent body odors wafted towards me as stepped into our vehicle.

“Your entire agency should be dissolved by the city. Waste ‘a money. They just need taxis. Free taxis for everyone. No one needs these big trucks.”

We pointed out how our service is designed for medical emergencies and that we are supposed to handle life-threatening conditions.

“For what? They can go to the hospital if they have a medical condition.”

It was no use explaining.

Once inside, the man immediately demanded that we take him to a hospital that was not the close one nearby. He was geared up for an argument but he got none. The hospital he wanted wasn’t unreasonable, although it meant I’d have to try to block the smell a little longer.

“Them nurses there are NASTY!” he told me, as he shook his head. “Ugly too. But that’s the hospital it’s gotta be.” He looked sad but determined, as if he had resigned himself to a task for which he’d be martyred for.

He refused to answer my routine questions about his name and birthday. He was ready for another argument, explaining how I wasn’t entitled to any of his personal information. He went on a long diatribe about privacy issues but I had already put “unknown/refused” on my paperwork. When I asked to take his vital signs he also refused, telling me he’d “sign the paper”, meaning he understood how this all worked. He flipped my paperwork over to the correct section and signed the name he told me I wasn’t entitled to know.

When I asked him about his reasons for going to the hospital he seemed comfortable revealing some of his medical history. He told me he had high blood pressure but he wasn’t taking his medicine because it made him “less of a man”. He said he was “healthy as a horse, and hung like one too”. A big wink, in my direction, accompanied that information.

I also received a very long list of every injury that had ever befallen him. He had TMJ from being slapped by his ‘ex’, he lost a tooth by biting into a biscuit from a large fast-food chain he was currently under litigation with, and he fell down some stairs when he was drunk, which injured his hip. He ended his story by telling me that his last MRI showed he had bulging discs.

I just wanted something halfway relevant to give to the triage nurse. “Am I telling the ER that you have back pain?” I asked.

“No, Moron, I’m telling you I ALWAYS have back pain,” he shook his head again. The torture I forced him to endure…

He called me several other names and titles that illustrated his frustration with our procedures. I was a “bureaucrat” for requesting an exam and interviews instead of just taking him to the hospital where he “needed to be right away”. I was also a “lazy union drone”, an “idiot”, and my favorite, “a feminazi” because I was doing a “man’s job”. He told me I had foolishly “bought into that whole women’s rights nightmare” because I was a “man-hater”.

He went on to complain about my partner as well, for not refusing to work with a woman (“it takes the masculinity away from all of us”). He told us how much he hated the entire 911 system, the city itself, the shelter system, and he went on and on about our previous mayor, who he believed was still “running the show”. He hated “bleeding hearts” and the socialists who were destroying our city. He also complained about the city services he wanted but did not exist, like free taxis. He complained about the amount of money he received from his federal Supplementary Security Income, telling us a monthly total that was more than my partner and I took home with our regular salaries.

“You can’t live on that in this city!” he screamed.

I know man, I know…

One person, in particular, he decided to vent his frustrations about, was the woman who had purchased food for him from the deli. She was another “MORON” for not understanding that he’d been asking for money for food, not actual food.

“Maybe I wanna make my own choices,” he said. Then he referred to her with a really bad slur for a female. “She was like ‘I don’t want my money being used for alcohol. My religion is against alcohol. I don’t want to support any bad health habits…’ blah blah blah. Fucking bleeding heart…Those people are the ones destroying everything.”

As he was berating the woman who bought him the contents of his bag, he took everything out of it to rearrange the items. She had given him a large bottle of water, a big can of iced tea, an assortment of baked goods, a package of socks, a package of t-shirts, tissues, a small bottle of pain relievers, a few bagged snack items, cold cuts, and two large Styrofoam containers of food. She certainly was an evil monster.

“This asshole didn’t even have my food heated,” he told me with all seriousness. “You know, they let you reheat the food from the food counter in there. She must have known, there’s a sign right there on the sneeze-guard. I would have gone in to heat it myself but I’m banned from the store. I spit in a few of their food trays once. I didn’t like their choices and I had a right to express myself when they didn’t take my concerns seriously. Bunch-a bleeding hearts…” It seemed to be his favorite insult.

“Cold food. Can you believe it?”

As someone who ate between calls and on the run, sadly, I was all too familiar with room temperature sustenance.

We had just reached the ER when he was finished fixing the bag up the way he wanted it, with the food containers near the top. He promptly undid his seat-belt, slid over to the back doors, and expertly opened the back lock. Then he made his way over to the hospital entrance without waiting for either my partner or myself. Now that he had reached his intended destination, he no longer needed to have anything to do with us.

He punched the ‘secret’ code into the panel that opened the electronic doors and proceeded to walk past the triage area. A security guard followed him, telling him he needed to wait for the nurse.

“I don’t need a nurse,” he told him. “I know where I’m going.”

The security guard didn’t seem to know what to make of that but decided to just let him continue rather than pursue him any further. Our patient walked right over to a small, closet-sized room that the nurses used as a kind of lounge. It contained a locked bathroom, two chairs, and there was a microwave on a counter.

He opened the door to the microwave, put in the first of his two containers, and pressed the button for “potato”. The man had concluded his ultimate errand.

The entire ER came to a standstill as every nurse in the vicinity noted what was happening. Each face expressed disbelief and anger. They looked around at each other to see who was going to act first. Oh boy, were they outraged!

The nurse who was supposed to triage me marched right over to the small room with resolute determination. She was fuming. “Sir, this room is off-limits to patients.”

“I’m not a patient,” he told her matter-of-factly. “I’m just here to heat my food.”

“Sir! This is a restricted area. You need to leave! You can’t just come in and start heating your potato.”

“It’s not just for potatoes. I’ve got pork that needs to be heated to a specific temperature or I might get sick. There’s also some mac and cheese, some green beans… ‘Potato’ is the most efficient setting on a microwave. You don’t even know how to use this thing, do you?”

“This microwave does not belong to you. You can’t use it. You don’t belong in here.”

“Sure I can. My taxes paid for this microwave.”

“Sir, you don’t understand. You need to leave and get back over to triage,” she said as she pointed to the triage desk. You could tell that her patience had reached its limits.

“No, you don’t understand. This is the whole reason I came here, to use the microwave. I’m not sick. And if I were, I sure as hell wouldn’t come here.” He looked around the ER. “This place SUCKS!” He seemed surprised at everyone’s reaction as if he’d said something perfectly reasonable and they were all getting angry for nothing.

“Security! Security!” the nurse started yelling.

At the same time, another disheveled looking man, who was on a stretcher in the hall took a moment to defend the hospital. “Ahhhh, it’s not so bad…”

A different patient decided to tell our guy, “you don’t even pay taxes.”

“Yes I do,” he answered. “I pay taxes every single day on alcohol. Do you know how much the liquor tax is in this state? It’s robbery. I coulda bought 10 microwaves by now with all the cash I’ve given to this bleeding heart state.” Bleeding heart was, by far, his favorite term.

The security guard, now forced to contend with the disruption he might have intercepted earlier, simply parroted what the nurse was already saying. “Sir, you have to leave…”

“Hold your pie-hole,” said our patient as he dipped his dirty finger into different sections of his Styrofoam container. “I’ll be out of your hair in just three more minutes. Your appliance needs servicing, by the way. For 1000 watts, ‘potato’ should have done the trick by now.”

The bald officer decided to get to the root of the problem. Looking around, he asked, “Who brought this man here?”

I raised my hand.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asked me.

“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “He refused to provide any information.”

“What? Are you all stupid?” announced the guy I had brought in. “I CAME HERE TO USE THE MICROWAVE.” He yelled each word slowly as if reprimanding a room full of misbehaving children who did not understand. Then, his mood switched over suddenly to humor us. “Now that I’m here, maybe I’ll lay down on one of these stretchers when I’m done. Probably have the ‘itis in a few minutes…” He laughed, seemingly oblivious to the unchanged demeanor of the crowd.

The nurse, who despite her constantly annoyed expressions was one of my favorites, became more of my hero when she decided to take control after giving a disgusted look to the security guard. She shoved past the foul-smelling man and took his food out of the microwave.

“The Jo-velle Deli on Louisiana and DeKalb. Excellent buffet. Smells great, right?” Our guy gave high marks to the establishment that banned him.

The nurse took the food and started marching with it, towards the electronic doors. Our man followed her, although he seemed to be confused about what was going on. When she got outside, the Styrofoam container was semi-tossed onto a broken stretcher in the ambulance receiving bay and she wordlessly went back inside.

After she signed our paper, which was accompanied by a “look”, we went back outside to find our man eating the food that terrible woman had purchased for him. He looked up at us and smiled, pointing to his meal.

As we got in our truck, he yelled at us to wait for him. He would be needing to microwave his other Styrofoam container soon and there was only one other hospital we could take him to now that he was banned from using the microwave at this one.