streetstoriesems

The career archive of a NYC paramedic

Category: ems

The Taxi Equivalency

April 12, 2022 /

[Please note that I am in no way an expert on billing or ambulance services across the country. This rant is just based on my experiences and the limited research I’ve done. Information on billing practices changes frequently and is something that should probably be addressed in the ongoing public debate about our healthcare crisis]

There’s nothing that causes a mass convergence to ambulances to a particular location faster than an interesting trauma job. It’s not the gory details that so many seem to assume is the appeal but the opportunity to do something worthwhile for a patient that encompasses the training and skills we are taught but do not often use.

Given the countless other calls we respond to, for the most mundane things that often don’t even require a cab, much less an ambulance, the chance to make a difference is at the heart of every adrenaline junkie. For every man with a limb caught in a machine, there are thousands of toothaches, cough/cold/flu, common rashes, headaches, and attempts to get a prescription renewal through the ER. It’s so incredibly frustrating to imagine how people will complain about waiting 8 minutes for an ambulance because they need to go back after an antibiotic they received (when you brought them two days before), has not cured their complaint yet but they will quickly jump into a taxi for something we can actually do something for.

Despite having a vague idea of what his daughter did for a living, my father drove himself to the hospital during each of his three heart attacks. He felt it an unnecessary expense. It’s not that he didn’t have insurance that would have covered the cost, he absolutely did. He just didn’t think that anyone should pay such outrageous prices, not even the large for-profit corporation he was paying 35% of his fixed retirement income to for his Medicare supplement. But this wasn’t some frivolous add-on as I desperately tried to explain to him.

The entire motivation to create paramedic units was to provide critical cardiac care, an area where timing is the difference between life and a diminished quality of life or death. A paramedic crew, in addition to providing provided pain relief and supportive care, could have evaluated his EKG to determine which artery was blocked and sent that information to a STEMI specialty hospital where he would have been sent to immediately clear the obstruction, saving valuable heart tissue. The necrotic atrophy he suffered as a result of waiting caused him to become a ‘cardiac cripple’, where the most basic tasks left him breathless and exhausted. Each subsequent infarction lost him more freedom, just because he felt $1,200 was too much for an insurance company to payout for a “ride”. [my dad lived in a different city but their ambulance services and pricing mirrored NYC’s almost exactly].

But insurance companies don’t work like that anyway. It’s not as if the bill says X amount and they send off a check for that exact amount. Their payments are based on a complicated formula agreed upon by the health care provider and the insurance company.

I remember the bill one of my patients, who had Medicaid, showed me. A municipal ambulance usually showed up at her door each time she called 911, which was fairly regularly, and we charged roughly $1,200.00, at the time. But one time she called, a contracted provider in our service took her to the hospital and that bill was over $2,000. Medicaid paid out $16 for us and $22 for the private hospital provider even though we were advanced life support and the private was basic life support. She was extremely upset by the disparity that she wasn’t paying for and wrote letters to Medicaid saying that we, the municipal providers, deserved the extra $6.

It’s another issue altogether, how calling the same number for the same service results in different prices, particularly when you didn’t specifically request one provider over another. I’m not sure how the different providers operating in the same 911 system, where calls are randomly assigned, can charge different prices. I can see their need for it, but it doesn’t seem fair for the average citizen who makes the call to 911 not knowing that the billing isn’t uniform.

Healthcare billing practices in general leave plenty of reasons to be anger inducing. Good luck trying to research how they come up with pricing and payouts. It’s a secretive system that lends itself to distrust and fears of corruption The only people who are generally charged the listed amount are people with no coverage, people who I can very much understand fearing the burden of an ambulance bill added on to an already massive ER bill.

I often see on social media posts (and my family and friends tag me to see even more) how ridiculous it is that an ambulance transport costs so much when a taxi is only a fraction of that expense. “We only went two miles!” and “I was charged $2,000 for an 8 minute ride!” The taxi equivalency is incredibly frustrating as it reduces our training and equipment down to a vehicle whose sole purpose is simply to get a person from point A to point B. If a taxi would have sufficed, you probably didn’t need an ambulance.

People with a hefty co-payment or those who fear having to make explanations and justifications to an insurance provider generally don’t use our service as a taxi equivalent. But many, many people do. It’s frustrating to be used as free transportion to the hospital for someone who will spend six hours waiting in an ER for a free bottle of Tylenol because they didn’t want to pay $6 at a pharmacy. It is especially heartbreaking when the call before it involved discussions with a different, critical patient over their very valid fear of an outrageous bill which kept them from getting the critical care you know they needed.

There was once a well-publicized shooting in the area I work, of a child hit by gunfire. To be clear, everyone races to a child in distress call. Units that don’t normally join in the rush towards trauma will run towards a critical child. Even though the first unit arrived less than three minutes after the shooting was reported (because many units monitor the police frequencies), the child had already been put in a neighbor’s car to be taken to the nearest ER. “He was hit by a bullet,” they said. “What were we supposed to do?” They also told us that “the neighbor works for Uber, so he knows where he is going.”

Sadly, the Uber driver didn’t know that the closest hospital wasn’t a trauma center, which is a place equipped to provide the immediate surgery critical to saving life from traumatic injuries. Pediatric trauma centers are another specialty altogether. All the hospital they went to could do for that child is provide the same kind of stabilizing care a paramedic unit was capable of (and would have done en route), and transferred him, by ambulance, to one of the few pediatric emergency rooms in the city. The delay was detrimental and tragic.

Hospitals are not all the same and while most provide similar care for most categories there are dozens of designated specialties that are unique to different facilities. Specialty centers go to great expense to maintain a detailed list of requirements for that specialty certification. Trauma centers, for example, are required to have an operating facility fully staffed at a moments notice. Keeping an operating room ready on stand by is an expense that most hospitals will not recoup from insurance payouts from individual trauma patients, it’s why there are so few of them. There are also specialty burn centers, stroke centers, cardiac catherization, limb replantation centers and several others. And there are no hospitals in NYC that have every specialty. Also, not all specialty centers are able to accommodate the constant influx of that specialty and will go on ‘diversion’ for that specialty should they become overwhelmed.

How would anyone know all this if they were in an Uber? They wouldn’t, but we would, thanks to a state of the art mobile data terminal that all ambulances in the 911 system are equipped with. It provides real time updates of availability and hospital acceptance.

How does a municipality pay for this, and the (pitiful) salary of the EMTs and paramedics using them, along with the thousands of dollars of monitoring equipment, supplies, communications (along with salaries of dispatchers and 911 call takers), the rotation of medications, vehicles and maintenance, facilities, software, and the thousands of other surprising things that go into a 911 ambulance? In part, by sending a $1,200 bill.

If you want to give yourself a headache figuring out billing practices, here are some links:

https://time.com/198/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/

Two Idiots Change a Tire

June 8, 2021 /

Not long after starting my new job on the ambulance, I was partnered with another graduate of the Bureau of Training’s Cadet 6 class. At best, we had only about five shifts between us, all with more experienced partners, at least. Although the ink had barely dried on our EMT certifications, we were handed the keys to a $250,000 vehicle and set loose on the residents of Manhattan. It was a glorious time to be in EMS.

When I first started, it was not uncommon for two people from the same class to work together immediately after graduation. There were some lieutenants who frowned upon it and tried to divide established partners for a shift so they could impart their knowledge on us novices, but more often than not, they’d cave to the objections of people who did not want to be split up to “babysit” the newbie.

It’s probably good that our service moved towards an internship type of system that would have prevented this, but back then the impetus was really more on filling vacant seats with anyone they could get. The patients would probably be OK, they reasoned. We were both EMTs, they reminded us, so we should know what we are doing. And as new EMTs, our knowledge was even better than our seasoned cohorts because it was still fresh in our minds.

At the start of our shift, we loaded our brand-new helmets and pristine, newly-stocked tech bags onto, possibly, the worst vehicle in the fleet.

It spewed black smoke out of the tailpipe. The then-standard carpeting on our center console was covered in long-expired foodstuffs. Since the cabinets in the patient compartment slid open as if they had been greased, our supplies were all over the floor. But we checked and cleaned up our ambulance and headed out for what ended up feeling like the longest shift in eternity.

We decided to take turns driving because none of our other partners had let us do it before and we had no idea when we ever would again. Our ambulance for the day had terrible handling and seemed to veer toward the left all the time. It was also incredibly loud and would randomly backfire. Now that our service has switched over to diesel vehicles, it’s one feature I look back on fondly.

Our first patient was a 19-year-old man who lived with his girlfriend on the top floor of a four-story walk-up. (This kind of building dynamic would become a standard theme for me for the next 30 years).

The man’s neck was hurting after sleeping in an uncomfortable position in a drafty room. For some reason, we ended up carrying this guy down those four flights of stairs on a backboard with a cervical collar. The board and collar was standard procedure for a neck injury but technically, some trauma should have been involved.

I remember him clutching his teddy bear the whole way down those grueling stairs. I don’t know what we were thinking. Days and months later, whenever we saw each other after this shift, my Cadet 6 partner and I would always bring up how stupid we were for doing this.

“Remember the teddy bear carry down?” one of us would say. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

We did all kinds of stupid things that day, things we would never think to do three months later when we would officially pass the delineation point where we could finally be called “seasoned” EMTs.

We took patients to the hospitals they insisted on, even if the hospital they wanted didn’t have the services they needed. (There were no computer terminals in our vehicle that gave us up-to-date information on hospital availability back then.) And we spent far too much time trying to park in ways that wouldn’t inconvenience other motorists.

As the day went on, it became more and more difficult to ignore the wheel issues that were plaguing our driving efforts. So we got out and did something much more idiotic than carrying a teddy-bear-clutching 19-year-old down four flights of stairs for no legitimate reason. We went out mechanical for a flat tire.

The tire, we figured out later, had probably been flat for weeks, having been conveniently overlooked by the more experienced (smarter) crews. But because we were stupid, we called for the tire truck.

The way the procedure was meant to go was that a tire truck would arrive at your location and hand you the tire and the tools. Then he’d lean against his truck and watch you change the tire while he smoked a cigarette and thumbed through pornography.

I remember the fat, bald, “Tire Mechanic” snickering as he handed me the tire iron. Part of me wanted to show him up. In my head, I thought “Fuck you asshole, just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I can’t do it!”

I had changed tires on my own car a few times; I knew I was capable. But the other part of me was thinking about how the “mechanic” was making three times my salary and he was just going to stand around and watch. I seriously considered ways I could mess the whole operation up.

It wouldn’t be hard to screw up the tire procedure, I quickly learned. I was pretty sure I zoned out during the tire-changing demonstration during our Emergency Vehicle Driver Training class anyway. Hopefully, my partner had paid attention.

It was a hot June day and we were getting filthy and tired. But we muddled our way through it. It was arduous work just to get the lug nuts off. It had been ridiculous to equivocate my car tire-changing skills with this behemoth. It wasn’t like changing a regular tire because they were bigger and two of them were loaded onto one axle.

Then, when we started loading the new tire on, the fat, bald guy suddenly noticed that he’d given us the wrong kind. He had to put down his Hustler magazine and go through his stock again.

Since we had inconvenienced him, he made some snarky comments under his breath as he went through his supply. After he gave us the new, correctly sized tire, he resumed his leaning position on his truck and found the previous spot in his porn rag. He made sure that I could see what he was looking at and gave me a disgusting wink. I had no doubt that this man’s only sexual outlet was porn.

One important thing I did learn, finally, was the art of time management. At one point, I reminded my partner what time it was and how much time was left in our shift. He instantly understood that we were going to make sure this activity would be the last thing we did on our shift together.

So, we took our time and worked to ensure that everything we did was done methodically, slowly, and re-examined. Our tire truck guy kept checking his watch with a sigh as if we were delaying an impending meal break. He stopped giving me snickering winks and started getting impatient, which gave me some inner satisfaction.

When we were finished, our white shirts, which had already gotten a little dirty earlier, were now covered in grease and soot. They would never be truly white ever again. My hair had a new shape and had expanded further outward (it was the 80s). My partner’s hands were cut up and his glasses were askew. Our new cavalier attitude towards our appearance did not go unnoticed by our coworkers.

“But you survived, didn’t you?” they said.

satan, lucifer, book

Fighting Demons

March 5, 2021 /

It was easy to see that the building had once housed a storage business. It was square and utilitarian and it said “Horizon Storage” on one of the walls. The only thing that let you know that it now served as a house of worship was a big wooden sign over the lettering of the previous owner. “Vision of the Awakened Triumph Church” it proclaimed. “The Rev. A. Thompson, PhD, Pastor”.

We walked into a large room where a congregation wearing their Sunday best had their attention fixated on several men, surrounding another man, who was wearing a burgundy suit. They were in a circle around him, each with an arm touching him, and they appeared to be praying. When the congregation saw us their serious faces of concern turned into smiling faces of relief. “Hallelujah, and welcome!” they greeted us. I was instantly smitten by their friendliness and hospitality.

We went over to the man they were praying over and the other men moved away. The man dressed in burgundy instructed the others to continue with the service. “It’s important,” he told them.

Although we were in the back of the room, it was difficult to hear the patient and we suggested going out to the ambulance. But the man insisted that he didn’t want to go to the hospital. He did not even want to be checked out in it. He said it was important that he stay. So we did the best we could to evaluate him where we were.

Brother Henry was a little disheveled. He had some dust on a sleeve and a few bruises on his hands. While he was telling us about a few more injuries, a nearby woman yelled at him to “Tell them how you went out! They don’t care about a couple of bruises. Tell them how you ended up on the floor unconscious!” She told us that was why we were called. “We wouldn’t have called if it were just a few bruises,” she told us, as if no one would call for such a frivolous reason. How I wished…

Brother Henry looked a little embarrassed but he shook his head and said with his voice rising, “I may have fallen down but I was never knocked out!”

We asked him if he was dizzy now or before the incident and he said no. Another woman said he had “problems with sugar” but Brother Henry assured us that he did not have diabetes. All of this, coupled with our initial difficulty hearing, steered us towards a medical path for the origins of what happened. We hooked him up to our monitor and evaluated his vital signs several times while continuing to ask questions. At one point the entire congregation broke out into song and it was modified to be about us, being the instruments of the Lord. They also prayed for us several times. It was incredibly nice and wonderful.

We could find nothing of concern with our exam but we still recommended Brother Henry seek additional evaluation at the hospital because he may have passed out. Brother Henry interrupted, “Passed out? I never passed out.” We explained that we didn’t know what had caused the incident and he shook his head and said very emphatically “Sure I do! I told you when you got here. I was fighting a demon.”

This took us both aback somewhat as we tried to figure out what metaphorical context he was referring to. Was he an addict? What other ‘demons’ are there? It turned out, however, that he meant a literal demon, the kind that involved being a mythical beast intent on evil. And everyone in the congregation agreed.

Brother Henry explained that he had given a particularly powerful invocation which had conjured up an entity that he described as half man, half beast. Everyone in the room nodded in solemn agreement. A small puff of smoke had appeared, through which the demon had entered, laughing. He said his head was large and somewhat resembled a buffalo. “With wide horns!” said one lady. “That’s how he was gored!”

Brother Henry lifted up his shirt to reveal a red circular bruise. There were fresh scratch marks on the floor, which, we were told, were made by the cloven hooves of their common enemy. Henry showed us his damaged pant leg where underneath was a long red scratch and more bruising. He said the demon had kicked him. His description had the demon towering over all of them at around 7 feet. Others volunteered that he had long fingernails painted red and glowing yellow teeth. Not one of the 30-40 people in the room disputed this description or version of events.

“Where is the demon now?” we asked.

The demon had disappeared, they said, when it saw that he was no match for a powerful man of God. Brother Henry was a strong elder, they explained, and he was backed up by people of unshakeable faith. Vision of the Awakened Triumph: 1, Demon: 0.

My partner and I just looked at each other for a minute. The paperwork was going to be tricky.

I quickly opened my call report paper and flipped it to the side where the RMA (refusal of medical attention) section was and Brother Henry readily signed in the appropriate areas. The Rev. A Thompson, PhD, witnessed it himself. It was either have him sign the RMA or haul all 40 of them to the psych ward for evaluation.

As we left, the friendly people of the church all wished us well and said they would pray for us. We could use it.

“What just happened in there?” my partner asked. I shook my head. I thought about the bruises and the rips in his clothing, the seriousness of everyone in the congregation. What could have caused all those injuries? What had they all witnessed? Some sort of mass delusion? Maybe there was a reasonable explanation that they interpreted as a demon? Who could say? We weren’t there. I just hoped our paperwork wouldn’t be flagged by the reviewers at the Office of Medical Affairs.

The Two Roslyns

September 24, 2020 /

I met the first Roslyn a year or two after I started working in Manhattan. The first time we went to her apartment she had accidentally broken a crystal vase and had cut both of her hands significantly. One wound on her wrist was bleeding badly enough that she thought she may have severed an artery and she was very distraught about it. Despite being upset, she was polite and mostly friendly. There was a lot of blood in her modern living room which had sweeping views of the East River. As I started the paperwork I leaned on her grand piano and glanced at the framed photos on display. They illustrated an enviable life. There were photos on safari in Africa, skiing photos in what looked like Switzerland and several happy pictures of friends and family. In one photo it appeared that a young Roslyn had gotten some kind of award riding horses. There was also a wedding photo with a handsome man. The man was not present and when it was time to go to the hospital she was asked if they could notify her husband.

“Oh no,” she replied, somewhat bitterly.

We took her to the hospital and while we were waiting to be triaged another crew of EMTs, who were leaving, saw her and said hello, using her name. She said hello back in the embarrassed kind of way a person does when they think they’ve been mistaken for someone else and are just trying to be polite.

“Do you know her?” I asked later.

“Yeah, sure,” they said. “She’s a regular.”

Really? Most of our ‘regulars’ are either homeless or have chronic medical conditions requiring frequent hospitalizations. Our homeless regulars are, almost without exception, people with substance abuse issues. She didn’t seem to fit either of those categories. What could make Roslyn a regular?

“You’ll see,” they said. “She calls all the time.”

She calls all the time? For what? Is she accident-prone?

I had forgotten about it until the next time we were summoned to her apartment, which was not too long after. This time her apartment was messy. It wasn’t ransacked but it looked more like someone hadn’t picked up after themselves in a long time. The wedding picture was gone and some other things looks slightly different but I couldn’t tell exactly what.

Roslyn was intoxicated and rambling about having things stolen from her apartment. Her statements didn’t go together and went off on tangents that had to do with her job or her family, both of whom she hated at that moment. A long time was spent deciphering everything she said but eventually it was determined that the missing items were taken by her now ex-husband thanks to a “misogynistic, two-bit, loser judge” who had sided with him in the divorce. It wasn’t clear what she had called for since she didn’t want to go to the hospital and there was nothing actually ‘stolen’. The police abandoned their report but stayed on to assist us in taking her to the hospital as she was in no position to make an informed decision to refuse. She was furious about going to the hospital. We were accused of working for her ex. Our previously friendly and polite lady had turned into a cursing, spitting lunatic.

Each trip to Roslyn’s home for the next year or so also involved alcohol to some degree of another. There were stints in rehab, relapses, and long periods when she was sober, when she’d call 911 for relatively minor things every now and then. On these types of calls, I think she thought of us more as company and tried to serve us food and played the piano for us. She told us about her stressful job that she liked, despite a boss who had gotten promoted over her. She complained about her ex, who she felt had made out too well in the divorce. She gossiped about her neighbors. And once, when I admired a painting in her hallway, she mentioned she had painted it, saying that her first dream was to be an artist and that someday she was going to try again. Getting to know her during these sober periods made it all the more heartbreaking as we watched her decline years later.

Eventually we were called to her home when she had relapsed and discovered she had acquired four new roommates-other alcoholics who were clearly taking advantage of her. At some point she had lost the job she loved when the same man who had been promoted over her fired her. She told us of her struggle to find another job even though, she said, she didn’t need one. It was just something she wanted to do because she was good at what she did. I suggested that she could now pursue being an artist and she berated me. There was a huge personality difference between sober Roslyn and drunk Roslyn.

She may have misjudged how expensive Manhattan living is or perhaps her roommates had drank her savings away, we could only speculate, but sometime later we ran into Roslyn at a different hospital, on the west side, where we found out she was living somewhere else. She had lost her modern apartment with the East River views and was temporarily staying with a friend until she got back on her feet. She was genuinely optimistic and I desperately hoped she would be able to improve her situation soon.

Every once in a while we would see her again in different places. If we were driving around and spotted her we’d get her some food or give her a blanket. She was very well known by most of the EMTs who worked in midtown and we’d hear updates from each other after periods of not seeing her. Sometimes when we did see her, she acted like we were long lost friends. Other times when we picked her up she didn’t recognize us. And many times she was extremely mean and abusive. Knowing her backstory led me to be more sympathetic towards the many other alcoholics we dealt with on the job, who were similarly frustrated and angry at anyone whose existence validated their fear that they didn’t have control over their day to day life.

I would eventually leave Manhattan to go to paramedic school and after that I worked in Brooklyn. I never saw Roslyn again. At the time I left, Roslyn had used up all of the favors her friends owed her and was now exclusively living on the street. It had taken only the short time that I knew her that she had gone from having what seemed to be a fabulous life of the rich and privileged to becoming one of the many overlooked and forgotten people living in the street begging for change. It is my great hope that she eventually did turn things around.

There was another Roslyn I remember from my days in Manhattan, also. The second Roslyn’s trajectory went in a decidedly opposite direction. She also became a semi-regular during the time I knew the first one. This Roslyn had only called 911 for herself once, after her leg was injured by a bicyclist as she sat on a curb begging for money. Roslyn Two became familiar to us because many other people called 911 on her behalf.

A very large percentage of calls to 911 for people living on the street are made by a sympathetic or concerned person who sees something that bothers them without often knowing the whole situation. Calls come in for ‘unconscious’ people who are sleeping or ‘not breathing’ when they definitely are. Despite the large number of these calls leading to interactions with people who take their annoyance out on you for being woken up or interrupted I still found it a redeeming quality of humanity that so many people were concerned enough for strangers to have someone check up on them.

People called for Roslyn because they thought she was abused. Our second Roslyn had a discoloration on her face that could be construed as a black eye if you only looked at it quickly. She seemed to have parlayed this birthmark to her financial advantage.

The first time I met her we were responding to a 911 call for a woman who was beaten up and left in a garbage bag. The location given was in an area of high tourist traffic near Rockefeller Center. When we arrived we saw a small woman wearing a black garbage bag as a dress. There were cut outs for her arms and she had shorts on underneath. She also had a cup that she used to solicit donations. When she saw us coming she ran up to us and asked “Did someone call for me again?”

When we said yes she said that she felt that someone who had given her money may have called. She apologized for inconveniencing us and assured us she was OK and did not need an ambulance. The garbage bag, she said, served to garner her more sympathy and had gotten her more ‘tips’ which is how she referred to the money she made panhandling. We made the call an unfounded but came back again later when yet another call came in fitting Roslyn’s description.

When we returned, she apologized again and reaffirmed that she did not want to go to the hospital or anywhere else. The man I was working with was very curious about her panhandling lifestyle and Roslyn was happy to talk with us about it. She said she could “take a break” but even while ‘off the clock’ and talking to us several people went out of their way to put money in her cup anyway. The ‘tips’ she was getting were not in coins, but in bills of $10 and $20. She told us this kind of donation was typical and that the summer months were very lucrative for her. During the Christmas season, however, she made much more, enough to pay her rent for the entire year.

We met her several times after that. Each time she let us know she as OK and each time she offered to buy us coffee for our trouble.

We learned much more about her enterprise when the bicyclist ran over her leg and she went to the hospital. She didn’t want to go initially but we convinced her by suggesting a cast and crutches could be helpful to her career. Her face lit up and she immediately hopped in our truck. As we wrapped up her leg she told us more about herself.

For a while she had lived in subsidized housing getting every government benefit available. She was very proud of the fact she no longer was, and that her kids went to private school. She said she had someone who helped her manage her income and that she had a diverse portfolio that included a 401K heavily invested in municipal bonds. She had worked it out that she only had to ‘work’ for 10 more years and at that time she would be moving to Florida to retire. She would be 38. Asked if she would continue to panhandle in Florida she said wouldn’t and was looking forward to picking up some hobbies like ceramics and painting.

A few months later I ran into the second Roslyn off-duty. I was out with some friends ‘in the city’ and as we were walking along a sidewalk she was there, sitting in front of a closed storefront with her outstretched cup. She looked very sad, almost in pain, as we approached she asked for some assistance. She didn’t recognize me without my uniform and with my hair down.

“Hey, it’s me!” I said. “EMS.”

Her whole demeanor changed. “Hey there, Nancy. Good to see you!”

“How is business going?” I asked.

“Pretty good,” she said. Then she winked and said “But it could always be a little better!” She stretched out her cup.

“I should be asking YOU for money”

She laughed and admitted that was probably true. I introduced her to my friends and made a little joke about how in a few years we’d run into her in Florida, sipping fruity cocktails with little umbrellas in them

“I’ll be in Florida all right,” she said. “But no fruity cocktails. I don’t drink. Ever. Drinking killed my father and I’ve never touched it. I’ve seen what it can do.”

I thought of the other Roslyn and agreed with her about the devastating effects it can have.

The Crying Woman

September 3, 2020 /

I don’t get too many opportunities to brag about this so here it is: I got the highest score to get into my paramedic class. The competition was fierce because they hadn’t held a class in over six years. FDNY had just merged with EMS and they felt it was a worthwhile endeavour to start the training program up again.

So I went into the first FDNY paramedic class. The class consisted of several former BLS (EMT) instructors from our Bureau of Training, along with EMTs representing all areas of the service from every borough, communications and operatains. We also had some lieutenants and a captain.

Not long after school started and study groups were being formed two former Marines announced that they would be running around Fort Totten before class and were hoping others would join them. Feeling the need to brush up on my repetoire of filthy military cadences I joined them.

We met in the parking lot by our building and took a beautiful tour around the historic grounds. Fort Totten was built in 1892.*more about ft totten, civil war * In the early hours of the morning, just after the sun comes up, its almost like stepping back in time running past abandoned barracks, officers quarters and other interesting structures that were part of army life back in the early 20th century and forward. Its a stunning place now run by the Parks Department. Many of the buildings have been restored and are used by outlets of other city agencies.

When made our way back to the parking lot everyone but me would indulge in a post work out cigarette. After a brief time talking about the day ahead or gossiping about various union situations or classmates we’d go in and get cleaned up.

At that hour the building was mostly empty and sometimes we would have to wait for one of the instructors to show up to let us in. It’s an oddly designed building consisting of long maze-like corridors that open up into larger areas. We utilized the downstairs bathrooms which were the only ones that had locker rooms and showers. They were considered to be in the basement where the corridors leading to storage areas and the lunch room. As the only female of the running group I had the whole place to myself. Most of the students didn’t take a locker and the classrooms were on the second and third floors which had their own bathrooms.

One morning after the crisp morning air had sufficiently opened up their lungs to better enjoy their smoke the break topic evolved to the rumor that, Erica, one of the prettiest students in our class, was having relationship issues. The rigors of paramedic school are notorious for causing domestic strife so it was only a matter of times before someone entered the dating pool again as a result of the intensive nine month course. How did our friend discover the news?

“I saw her being consoled by Kara. She was offering Erica a place to stay and told her she’d help her move out.” one of the runners said.

It was certainly a tasty snippet of gossip. “Oooh,” I remarked, “Points to Kara for jumping right in to fill the void right away.”

The men all looked incredulous and surprised, as if I had taken away their cigarettes. “What?” I asked. “Erica is into women. You guys really didn’t know?”

Defeated, my running partners lamented their imaginary loss. “That’s too bad.” said Roy, acting as if there would have been an actual possibility even if she weren’t a lesbian. “I would have been first in line.”

It became apparent to the rest of the class that the rumors were true as Erica spent long bathroom breaks returning with red puffy eyes. We all tried to give her space and many of us turned our attention to Kara to see what her game plan was. It provided some momentary distraction from the bombardment of drug charts, medical scenarios, and mathematical calculations.

One morning as I was in the shower after running I heard some sounds nearby. I was getting used to this room being my own personal spa zone so it peaked my interest a little. As I turned the water off I could make out the sobbing cries of a woman. I knew it must be Erica, as she sometimes found respite in this bathroom down here recently for privacy reasons. This one was far away from our classroom, much bigger, and since I took a lot of time scrubbing it down, smelled like my lavender cleaning products. She must have been aware of my presence but since she didn’t say anything I did my best to avoid her by staying hidden in the little changing area where I got dressed anyway. I flattered myself thinking that she trusted me enough not to be one of the many pushy, nosey people who flocked to her now. She seemed to be getting more and more uncomfortable with the overwhelming abundance of shoulders to lean on and probably just wanted to be alone to work things out in her head. I know that’s what I wanted when I was in similar situations.

I didn’t have to extend my time putting on my uniform as she left long before I was finished. When I went upstairs to our classroom I found her reading on of our textbooks and acting casually. She gave me a slight nod and a smile as I walked in. No worries, Erica, I won’t be smothering you like some of the others.

There were two or three other times in the upcoming weeks when I’d hear her crying during my post work-out ritual. I started to wonder if I should come out and offer my condolences but decided against it. She never brought it up and seemed to like to pretend nothing happened afterwards. I felt that we seem to have developed a routine and I wasn’t going to change it.

I didn’t hear the door slam when she left but one day I did. I was later than usual and almost time for class to start. I made a run for the door quickly afterwards. When I got on the side the only other person I saw was Roy, who was holding open the door to the men’s room. Their door was directly across from my door and he was waiting for the others. He smiles and waved at me and I smiled and waved back.

“You’re running a little late aren’t you?” he asked. “You’re usually upstairs by now while I’m usually trying to move these guys along.”

I told him I had waited for Erica to leave, making a sympathetic face. Roy looked at me with confusion. I told her how sometimes she had been coming down here when I was taking my shower and how I had heard her crying. I explained how I liked to leave her alone with her thoughts. Roy continued to stare at me with his facial expression changing to studious and intrigued but he still didn’t say anything. “What?” I asked. “Didn’t you see her just leave?”

He shook his head. “Erica left the class a few days ago, remember? She had dropped out so she could take care of her mother in Pennsylvania when she had the stroke.” I suddenly remembered that she had left the class. With all the field rotations we had been doing it was difficult to keep track of people’s schedules. I had some of my own distractions at the time and hadn’t kept up on the updates to the Erica story. The poor girl, I thought. Now her mother’s health problems on top of everything else. How much would she have to bear?

I turned to Roy and gave him a suspicious look. “How did you find out about her mother?” He didn’t seem to be part of the information loop that involved the other cliques in our class.

“I offered to help her move.” he said sheepishly with a smile.

I laughed, shaking my head while the other men came out of the locker room. “He still thinks he can get her to think of him as something other than a kindly old man.” one of them said. Roy was older than most of the class and thinking about him creeping about with pretty young girls was more comical than disturbing, thankfully.

Most of the time when I arrived in the Bureau of Training parking lot I was one of the first ones there. The next day, however, Roy was there before me and he jumped out of his car when I got there. He looked at me very seriously when he said “I’d like to hear more about the crying in the locker room. You definitely heard a woman crying?”

“Yes.” I answered. I admit I had been trying to figure out who else had been using my personal spa as a hideout.

“You know this place is haunted.” he told me.

I had heard it said before that Fort Totten was haunted. Though I was open to the idea that there were strange things that we didn’t understand I tended to try and debunk every example. People always say old places are haunted. I figured that Fort Totten used the notoriety to sell ghost tours around Halloween.

“Did you hear crying too?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But I saw doors open and close by themselves. There’s no breeze in that basement.” He asked me to tell him all about my experiences hearing the crying woman so I told him when and where it happened. He went through some of the dates I had narrowed down and told me that Erica had been on rotations for at least one, probably two, of those days. He was sure I heard a ghost.

“I didn’t realize you were such a stalker.” I noted.

“I’m just interested in the paranormal.” he told me.

“I was talking about your familiarity with Erica’s schedule.”

“Well she is a pretty girl…” he pointed out. “Anyway, I can tell you most of the time, outside of our little run club and that one lieutenant who gets here early to open the building, there’s no one else here. I get finished in the locker room quickly and while these guys are using their fancy hair gels and smelly after shaves I go to my car and put my dirty clothes in my truck. The parking lot is empty except for us, until about ten minutes before the day starts over here. But don’t believe me. Ask around. Everyone that works here has a story. You’ll see.”

Without mentioning my experience I did casually inquire with people that spend a lot of time in the building. I asked my former instructor classmates, current instructors, and one of the maintenance men. Not one of them thought the place wasn’t haunted. Each person I asked had felt strange feelings, heard sounds or experienced strange sighting. One man smelled tobacco and heard it being spit out. “Disgusting dip…” he told me, more bothered by chewing tobacco than a ghost presence. Everyone seemed to just accept that they shared the facility with some apparitions and no one seemed to be particularly frightened, at least not anymore, after they got used to it.

I heard the crying at least two more times. Despite telling myself that if I heard it again I would investigate it, I stayed frozen in my little changing area. At first, I’ll admit, there was an initial fear. I did try to discern what the noise could be if it wasn’t crying but I really couldn’t come up with any other explanations. Roy was right about there not being much airflow to to the basement. The pipes were old but the sound was completely different than anything they would produce, I felt. It was very distinctively female crying. But even when my supposed rational mind kicked in I decided to keep the unwritten agreement I had with who I thought was Erica. She probably wanted her privacy and I was happy to give it to her.

 

For more information about the paranormal at Fort Totten check out this link:http://www.liparanormalinvestigators.com/our-recent-investigations/fort-totten/

 

 

  

cartridges, weapon, war

10-13

August 22, 2020 /

After racing across the borough we had made it to the block our call would be on. We slowed down in an effort to locate the correct building. Finding address numbers from the street is not always easy. Down the road we could see someone sitting on their stoop. Since he made no effort to wave or flag us we assumed he was not associated with our call. When we reached his building we found that we were wrong.

He was probably around 16 or 17 years old and he got up angrily and made his way to our vehicle. He had an odd stomping type of gait that made it appear that his sneakers didn’t fit-and by the size of his sneakers it seemed true. His green athletic shorts appeared to be oversized as well. He also had on a tank top and a thick gold chain. He had messy hair and freckles and he was really mad.

He pounded on my window when he got to it. “Sure, take your time, bitches! Who cares if a man is dying upstairs? Right?” He backed off a little but he rattled me. My partner turned off the truck and got out. The kid started stomping over to the building thinking we were following. He turned back to look at us, furious that we weren’t right behind him. He gave us that “come on” look.

“We have to get equipment.” my partner said.

“Fucking just take your fucking time you lazy fucking cunts….Just let my uncle bleed to death why don’t you?” He came closer and lifted up his tank top to show us that he had a firearm. “I ought to pop the both of you so you could see what that’s like.”

My partner and I exchanged glances. “How about you open the door for us. We will be right there,” we told him. The kid was annoyed but apparently he didn’t think it was such a big deal to threaten people with a gun. He walked over to the door.

Instead of opening the side compartment where our equipment was, we opened the side door to the ambulance patient compartment and we both got in and shut the door behind us.

“10-13!” we screamed into our radio. This is a distress call for assistance. We gave our unit and location and requested police assistance immediately. We told the dispatcher we had been threatened with a gun and gave the description of the teenager. The dispatcher advised us to find a ‘safe place’ until police arrived.

The kid came back to the ambulance and began pounding on it. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he demanded. He continued to curse us and I wondered what kind of protection the walls of this vehicle really offered us.

It seemed like a long time but it was really just a few minutes that we sat crouched down from the flimsy windows of the patient compartment. Our call for help was answered in a spectacular display as multiple police cars and ambulances pulled up to the scene. We continued to wait inside until we saw that the police had surrounded our potty-mouthed antagonist.

“Why are you arresting me? Arrest THEM! Those girls don’t care if my uncle is DYING.” he was yelling.

“Well,” said the cop. “If he was dying, you killed him by threatening the people who could have done something about it.” The loaded gun was secured and the kid showed no sign of remorse.

A lieutenant showed up after all the ambulances, which is automatic today but was not always the case back then. I recognized Lt. Larry from a station close to ours. I didn’t know much about him but he wasn’t very popular. His face was smiling and he seemed to be doing this ‘calm down’ motion with his hands. As he walked by he told everyone to go back into service. One crew offered to stay and check out the original patient. “That probably won’t be necessary,” he told them.

He came over to us and made a face that I read to be ‘oh you hysterical women, what have we done now?’ He asked us what the “fuss” was about.

“I guess you didn’t hear our radio transmission.” I offered. The implication that he hadn’t monitored his radio properly seemed to make him defensive.

“So you were threatened? With a gun?” he didn’t seem to realize there was a man being arrested for that very thing. We explained that yes, that is exactly what happened. “You mean it was just in his pants? So you even know what a real gun looks like? Especially if he never took it out?” This was incredible. What stupid girls we were for quickly thinking the worst and acting on it. “He was probably just trying to scare you. Is that why you didn’t go inside to check on the patient? Did you think about him? What about him, what’s he doing?”

A police officer heard what was going on and said “Are you implying that they should have ignored the threat? Are you saying that you’d risk having them shot and killed? You’re a terrible boss, a terrible human being. Honestly. I think you should leave.”

Lt. Larry turned to him and said “It’s easy for you to say. You have no idea. We’ve got calls holding. Look at all these ambulances here, all in one place. These girls are OK. Nothing happened.” He turned to us. “Now who’s going to go check on the patient? Did anyone think about him?”

The crew that had offered originally to check on the patient told him they were going. They asked some of the officers on scene to accompany them. It would turn out later that the uncle only had a varicose vein that had started bleeding. It may have looked dramatic but it was not life-threatening. If anyone had been overdramatic it had been us, according to Lt. Larry. It certainly wasn’t our man with the gun.

Lt Larry rolled his eyes but let them take over the call. “And so what are you going to do?” he asked us.

“They’re going to the precinct to make a statement.” said the officer.

“You mean he’s really arrested?” asked Larry. He said it kind of sardonically, as if some macho, he-men had made a show of things just to impress the ladies. Everyone was making a big deal for nothing. I heard from someone later that when he told the story to his peers he implied that the gun had probably not even been real, as if that really would have made any difference. He painted himself as the only rational person at the scene, concerned with getting units back into service and making sure the original patient didn’t file a lawsuit against the city.

“Yes. He’s really arrested. This is a felony,” said the cop. Lt. Larry raised his arms up in a big gesture of surrender to the overblown nonsense of the day.

The kid had been watching the exchange the whole time. As he got into the police car he started laughing and said to the cop, “Wow. That man really is an asshole.”

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