FierceUgly.com

Okay boys and girls, gather round, it’s story time…. a tale from the street.

The other night, we had a heroin overdose…no biggie, had this call probably 1000 times since becoming a medic…okay, maybe in the hundreds, but this call is easy to do, with very little work.  We get there to the crack house, and I mean, CRACK HOUSE…not just crackish, CRACK HOUSE… the guy is laying on the floor of the kitchen, belt that he used to pop a vein right beside him, no needle…(have to play private investigator too since I don’t wanna end up with HIV, AIDS, Hep C)….so he’s laying there, almost blue, breathing about 4-6 times a minute, and to those that don’t know, this isn’t a sufficient amount to breath if you want to maintain life.

The home remedy for an “accidental heroin overdose” is ice cubes on the groin or combination ice water and cubes all over the person.  This guy is soaked in both and there’s ice cubes everywhere…remember, no needle…no DIRTY needle that the guy used to “accidentally overdose himself”.  So we give the guy some oxygen, and give him shot after shot of a drug called Narcan.  Narcan reverses the affects of Opiads.  Usually 4mg does the job, which is two needles jabbed right in the upper arm into the muscle…8mg later, that would be 4 needles jabbed into the arm, the guy is still NOT coming too…so now, we have to carry this guy out of the basement apartment (call just went from suck to blow cause we gotta carry) up broken cement steps in the night with no lights, in Cracktowne USA…God how I appreciate my life and our home after leaving places like this…  So the firemen and I get this long back board and put the guy on it, we go to roll the guy, and what to my eyes should appear….the DIRTY needle.   You would have thought I said “there’s Abe Lincoln’s ghost” because the firemen got so scared and worried and pretty much dropped the guy.  Needle is set aside and the guy is now on the board being carried out.  Luckily for us, junkies tend to be all skin and bones, cause if this would have been a regular medic special, no doubt 400lb.+, we’d of all gotten hurt.

Now…here’s what ticks me off.  There is another guy in the house (by the way, as a side note, my partner Josie, had multiple gunshot victims in this house probably a year before this call…goodtimes being us, let me tell ya).  So the other guy in the house is swearing up and down he isn’t high, he doesn’t know this guy, he doesn’t know what happened…  Let me tell ya…Mike and I usually don’t allow people into our home that we don’t know…I don’t know too many people that do…so LIE #1….LIE#2 the guy’s pupils are so pinpoint it looked like they were grains of pepper….yes, he too was in fact high…just not overdosed!  LIE#3…”Sir, where and who did you get this heroin from?” says the cop…”Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I went into the living room to watch t.v., and I came back and he was on the floor, I don’t know what happened…”  So we are at 3 lies…sufficient amount of lies right….3 lies are all ya need…

NOPE…remember, we still have the unresponsive one on the stretcher now in the back of the ambulance, and you just know he’s packed full of LIES.  So I’m driving, I have the camera on so I can watch Josie in the back and make sure she’s okay and the guy doesn’t suddenly wake up and freak out…(you never really know what they’ll do when they “wake up”)…now mr. unresponsive is waking up….enter LIE#4: “Hey….wassss….wasssss….goin’….on?”  Josie asks “what’s your name dude?”….”Wah……wah….what happened?”….Josie says “Dude, you overdosed…what’s your birthday?”…..”I didn’t overdose, what are you talking about” – those words he can say clear as a damn bell!  They must practice this crap in junkie 101!  So now we are at LIE#4….which he continues to say over and over again on the way to the hospital….he didn’t do nothing, he doesn’t do drugs, he doesn’t remember…yadda,  yadda, yadda…

Here it is in a nutshell…do me, as well as medics around the world, a favor, don’t insult our intelligence.  I’m not a doctor, but I’ve seen more dead folks, dead kids, DEAD BABIES, heard every story and then some…I’ve heard every imaginary made up medical condition, made a few up of my own to scare people just for s’s and g’s, listened to people having “anxiety attacks” that couldn’t breath but magically could speak and recite the Constitution of the U.S.  I’ve worked more than my fair share of overdoses, most of which we “woke up”, I’ve seen limbs hanging off of people, bone shattered all over the highway, bones sticking out and sideways from people where bones should not be,  eyes hanging out of skulls, people shot in their heads, brain on the street running into the sewer, I’ve held the hands of more people dying and was the only and last face they saw before crossing over, we’ve cut dead kids out of cars because their uncle was high and driving on the highway in the wrong direction (St. Patrick’s day 2002).  I had the unfortunate task of telling a mother that her 16 year old daughter with MS died when she fell out of her bed.  My co-workers watched helplessly as three officers died, laid in the street shot, still screaming for help (This past April, shot by a coward that waited for them with an AK47).  We’ve seen 5 kids burned to death because their mother locked them in the house in their room while she went to the bar to drink and they were pulled out one by one, only to be pronounced dead on arrival….  I have seen the worst of humanity and the best at times….please don’t LIE!  Why lie?!  I’m not there to rat you out to the police, I’m not there to tell you drugs are bad mmmmmm k, I’m not there to be your mother…I’m there to save your life….DON’T LIE!

Stay tuned, because next week boys and girls…we have the big bad G20 Summit coming to town, and this is probably going to be a historic moment for us all…stay tuned to your television news channels!  I can’t say where I’ll be since it’s security sensitive, but I can assure you, the stories will be good ones!