My Shirt Comes Off Now

I used to drive to and from work in uniform.  I live about 30 minutes from work, on a good day.  When traffic gets thick it can be 45 minutes or so, from time to time.  It’s not bad.  I like the alone time, and I can just sit back with some music or an audiobook.  Not a big deal.

A few years ago, traffic was much worse than normal.  With the extra-long commute, I had extra opportunity for consuming excessive amounts of diet soda.  By the time I got off the highway, I was pretty sure my skin was taking on a yellowish tone.  As the saying goes, my back teeth were floating.  I was in a situation – a wide-eyed, diaphoretic situation.

I screamed into the lot of the first gas station off the highway.  My car was drifting sideways, tires smoking, and I squealed to a stop.  I leapt out and sprinted for the front door – I’m not sure I even shut the door on my car.  I ripped open the gas station door with the little chime and bellowed, “Bathroom! Where’s the bathroom?!?”  The attendant pointed me to the back of the store.  I took off in the direction she had pointed and found the restroom door.  

It was locked.  “Key! Where’s the key?!?” I screamed.

The attendant was running in my direction with a handful of keys gripped in her fist.  On the way, she was telling me how glad she was that I was here.  How nice of her to run, I thought.  She must be able to see my agony.  She is quite obviously a very considerate lady.

You would think that my brain would have caught on to the fact that all of this was weird, right?  In my defense, I think my synapses were awash in panic and suprapubic pain.  I really, really had to take care of business in the restroom.  But it is not normal to have a gas station employee be glad for you to use the bathroom, let alone hurry to get it open for you.  

The fog started to lift.  Wait a minute.  Why is she so glad that I am here?  I mean, I’m glad that the gas station is where it is, but why would she care that I have arrived to brighten her day with gallons of waste and groans of relief?  

Right about then, she got the bathroom door open.  As soon as there was room for me to fit between the door and jamb, I rushed in.  Inside I found an unresponsive dude with his pants around his knees lying on the floor.*  There was a needle in his arm, a belt around his bicep, and very slow wet snoring sounds coming from his face.  

Goddammit, of course there is a junkie in the bathroom, right now.  What else would there be.  The panic really set in at that point.  It’s not that I didn’t want to help, but I had to take care of a personal matter.  Plus, paramedics don’t like to admit it, but our jobs are pretty equipment dependent.  We like to tell ourselves that our brains and experience are our most important assets, but it is not true.  The bathroom ranger on the floor in front of me needed Narcan, not my brains.  An NPA and BVM would have helped.  I had a full bladder, but was fresh out of Narcan, NPAs, and BVMs. 

Thankfully, I was rescued almost immediately.  I had enough time to open my mouth in a look of dumbfounded disbelief before I heard behind me: “What do you have?”  It was the local firefighters from the suburban ALS department.  They were likely to possess Narcan, NPAs, and BVMs.  So I was extremely happy to see them.  But I definitely did not want to see them work this guy in the only crapper of this gas station.  (I needed it. Plus, who wants to work in a bathroom? That’s just nasty.)

I said, “Hiya, fellas.  Looks like a narcotic OD.  Let’s get him out of the bathroom so we have room to work.”

Godblessem, that’s exactly what they did.  One firefighter got the armpits, one grabbed the knees, and a third pulled Captain Bathroom’s drawers up.  As they moved him from the bathroom to the hallway, I stepped around them into the john.  As soon as the patient was out of the door, I closed it.  Those firefighters were my heroes that day.  

Ahhhhhhhh.
(By Weissman (own work), CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

Business was taken care of on both sides of the bathroom door. We shared a laugh about it when I was finished.  The firefighters were as confused to see me on their call as I was to stumble into an OD job.

The gas station attendant had happened to call 911 just a few minutes before I performed my tire squealing drift into her lot.  All she saw was a man in a paramedic uniform run into her store, right after she called for help.  That met her expectations exactly.  She couldn’t identify that my uniform was from a different jurisdiction.  She thought I was a responder.  

Thus, I don’t wear my uniform shirt to and from work anymore.  People can’t identify the 5.11 tactical pants I wear as EMS pants.  They just look like blue cargo pants, if people even look that closely.  The uniform shirt is pretty obvious, though.  Rendering aid without equipment is difficult, and I would rather be the one to make the choice to engage a call.  Nobody wants to be forced into it with a full bladder.

*I used to wonder what the matter with people was.  They really needed their pants down?  What is that, multitasking for addicts?  Who has time to poop and shoot separately?  Come to find out, it actually is in case their hit causes them to lose control of bowel continence.  That's why so many ODs are in a bathroom sans pants.