Emotions, Or The Tale of the Three-Legged Lab

I get emotional on calls.  It is one of my issues, I’m aware of it, and I monitor myself for it when I can.  What can I say – I’m a passionate man.  My emotions aren’t sad emotions.  I am unlikely to cry with a patient or anything like that.  My issue is with angry emotions.  Let me give you an example.

I was sitting at a southeastern post late one night with one of my favorite partners.  It was a pretty quiet night and so we were just hanging out.  For some reason, we were monitoring the police radio traffic in the northeast part of the city.  I think they may have had something interesting going on, so we were just eavesdropping a little and never shut it back off.  In any case, we heard a call go out:

Dispatch: “Car 54, 100 Main Street on a checkwell.*”

Car 54: “100 Main Street.”

Dispatch: “The female party that lives in that house is a diabetic.  She was in a verbal phone argument with her ex-husband and stopped responding to him.  Phone hasn’t been hung up.  The ex would like you to check on her.”

Car 54: “Okay.  Are the paramedics responding too, or is it just us?”

Dispatch: “Stand by, I will check.”

It wasn’t 2 minutes later that I got an emergency call to 100 Main Street.  According to my dispatch, the police were requesting emergent EMS for a diabetic problem.  That was the beginning of my problems.

I was fired up.  I had just heard a simple question from the police, the correct answer to which was “No medics, just you.”  Instead, I have to drive across the city with lights and siren for a welfare check that should have been handled by the police!  The cops weren’t even on scene yet!  The responding officers hadn't asked for EMS!  The woman was probably just angry and went for a walk without hanging up the phone!  Communication failed to occur in the communication center again!  Fire and brimstone!  Dogs and cats living together!

The long response had the result of getting me more worked up than would usually be the case.  I had five or six minutes to get myself all worked up, rather than just having a minute or two.  In addition, my partner was not especially the kind of partner to put the brakes on my emotions.  I don’t exactly remember, but it was likely that he was adding his own rants to mine.  Just picture two angry men driving fast, shouting about the nefarious plot to ruin our shift, amplifying each other.

We arrived to quite a scene.  Three police officers were standing on the hood of a cruiser.  One had a fire extinguisher-sized bottle of pepper spray.  One had a taser in his hand.  The last had his sidearm out. 

On the sidewalk next to the cruiser was an old yellow Labrador retriever.  You can tell when a lab is old because of the grey “spectacles” shape on its face and nose.  And this one had three legs.  It was acting just like a lab would when it gets to meet new people.  It was wagging its tail so hard that its whole body was wagging from side to side.  Its tongue was out so it looked like it was smiling -  just a happy, old, three-legged yellow lab.

Remember, I’m angry.  So I am not thinking as clearly as I should.  I was sincerely concerned at the nightmares that would follow a cop shooting this dog.  It was something that I felt the need to put a stop to.  I said to my partner: “What the hell is going on here?!?  They can’t shoot that dog!  I’m going to put a stop to all of this.”

Partner: “Bill, you should wait in the bus until we figure out what’s going on.”

Angry Idiot: “F**k that.  I’m not letting them shoot that dog.” 

Partner: “Well, I’m going to wait right here.”

I got out of the ambulance and walked up to the happy, old, three-legged yellow lab.  It looked even happier and older up close.  I knelt down and talked to it with a baby voice.

“Whuzza matter, are those big tough poweece officers afwaid of you?  No, you’re a sweetie, aren’t you.  Is your name Twipod?  Tell doze tough poweecemen to come down, you wanna pway…”  

The dog nuzzled up to me, still wagging its whole body, and I gave it a good petting.  I got my face licked, even.  At that point, the officer holding his pistol spoke up: “Here he comes again.”

My stomach dropped.  My taint tingled with fear.  I looked up the street behind me and initially thought a bear was charging me.  It was a brown blur, headed right at me.  Foam was flying and whatever it was was roaring.  Not barking.  Roaring like a bear, or a lion, or something.

It was the aggressive Chow that the cops had been macing for five minutes.  Oh, shit.

I looked up hopefully at the cruiser. 

The officer with the taser smiled: “No room up here, dickhead.”

I panicked and took off across the front yard at full tilt, headed for a six-foot cedar fence leading into someone’s backyard.  I had a fleeting hope that there wasn’t a Doberman in the yard closest to me that I was heading to, but mostly it was just an adrenaline-filled, high-stepping sprint for safety.  You've seen shows with a celebrity who volunteers to wear the bite suit and get taken down by a police dog.  It was like that, but with more panicked shrieking and no bite suit.  The Chow was right on my tail across the yard, roaring and foaming.

To this day, I don’t recall how I cleared the fence.  I probably just hurdled all six feet of it like Carl Lewis.  The dog, probably blinded by enough OC to clear a riot, crashed into the fence right behind me.  As I caught my breath, I climbed up a little to look over the fence.  The police were falling over each other laughing.  It was apparently the funniest thing they had ever seen.  If the Chow had turned on them, I don’t think they could have defended themselves for the laughter.  The Chow, who positively reeked of OC, was barking and snapping at me from the base of the fence.  My partner had climbed out the window of the ambulance to look over the roof. 

“See?” He shouted at me, “I told you to wait in the bus!”

So to finish up this story quickly, I had jumped into the backyard of 100 Main Street.  Her back door was unlocked and I found her on the kitchen floor in insulin shock.  Her blood sugar was under 20.  There was an alley behind her house that I told the cops and my partner about, so everyone came into the scene from the back.  We fixed the patient up and took her to the hospital, or whatever.  We just ignored the crazed Chow and old lab out front.

As far as I know, those two dogs could still be terrorizing that neighborhood – ten years later.

So, the lesson.  Can you see how my negative mindset put me on the path to failure?  I guess it wasn’t a complete failure of a call, but if I had controlled those emotions the call would have gone very differently.  I understand that angry emotions are something to watch out for, and I think I do a better job now of controlling them.  We all have constraints put on us through our personalities.  It is important to understand those constraints or pitfalls and avoid them, not to necessarily change who we are.  Who we are sets the context through which we view and affect the call.  Getting fired up about nothing is one of my (many) pitfalls to watch out for.

My hope is that each of you can take a good look at yourselves and pick out the pitfalls of your emotions.  Watch out for them and get yourselves under control.  Otherwise you may find yourselves running for your lives from bear-dogs.

*Checkwell is a welfare check.