John Miglarese is a Firefighter at West Brow Fire and Rescue station in Dade County. He writes fictional short stories inspired by real life experiences in emergency response.
Bonnie watched nervously from the porch for a glimpse of the lights through the trees. By the light of a slim moon she could see across the grass to the dirt road. The neighbor’s porch-light a quarter-mile down the road cast strange shadows on the big pinewood telephone poles. Something moved in the brush pile beside the porch. An armadillo? Or maybe a rabbit? She thought she could just make out the wail of sirens in the distance. What was taking so long? She looked down at her flannel shirt and realized she had missed a button. Hurriedly fixing it, she turned back into the house, letting the screen door slam behind her. “Honey?” came the worried, croaking voice from the back room. Every day it became a little less human. Yet it never quite lost that steady kindness, now merely a whisper at the end of every one or two-word sentence. But maybe she was just imagining it. It was nearly six years since the real Jim had faded into the shadows.
“Six years!” she sighed to herself as she walked through the kitchen, skirting around a counter overflowing with meds. What did that make her? Seventy-one? Surely not seventy-two? “Honey!” came the voice again, more urgent and yet weaker. She turned the corner into the small room beneath the stairs that had once been an office. Now a hospital-style adjustable bed took up most of the floor space. And there he was, under the fluffy white blanket, looking up at her through morphine-clouded eyes. She hated giving it to him, but at this point, it was the only thing warding off the searing pain of a shattered hip that had simply refused to heal. Bonnie leaned against the door frame. However, her moment of rest was fleeting and she stepped quickly over to the bed as the usual struggle began. “Dear, you have to stay in bed.” She told him as she gently pressed his shoulders back into the pillow. He settled, but then cried out feebly as he put weight on the bad hip. He began to struggle again.
His pain had been unusually intense tonight. Most of the time the morphine would knock it back enough for sleep to take over, but tonight was different. Tonight he had begun moaning again not five minutes after Bonnie had given the usual dose. Not even the extra “emergency dosage” had seemed to change anything. Soon his moans became weak screams. “Ow!” “help!” and worse, “Bonnie!” That’s when she had called.
Bonnie was relieved to hear the boots thunk on the porch just when she was wondering how much longer she could hold him down. “Greystone Fire Department!” was the usual call as they walked through the back door. The medics at the Greystone station knew not to attempt lugging the gurney up the steep front steps at this point. Much better to use the back door into the kitchen. “How we doing tonight?” asked the sergeant as he entered the back room. He was a big man, grizzled but not unkind.
The battles that followed his arrival were never something Bonnie liked to think much about. For years, Jim, in his confusion, seemed under the impression that these big men who came in the night were here to hurt him and would fight with all the power in his deteriorated body to escape. Bonnie worked not to cry as she pinned down the shell of her husband, speaking soothingly in his ear while trying to simultaneously answer the questions of the younger medic with the clipboard. Why couldn’t he step in and help the sergeant with the IV needle? Hell, if he would do her job, Bonnie could start it herself at this point. Getting the needle in was always the hard part; from there, they could lift his light body easily into the gurney. Tonight, however, the sergeant simply could not find the vein. Three tries on the first arm. No luck. Then on to the other. By the fifth attempt, the screams really picked up. “No! Please stop! Help me!” Bonnie felt a bittersweet pang at the thought that he had actually said a full five words consecutively.
“One, two, three, up!” and they lifted him into the gurney. This was especially painful. Bonnie tried to hold his hands so he would stop flailing while the medics strapped him in. But her attempts were unsuccessful, and it was a full ten minutes before they finally got him through the kitchen and out the back door. “Please help me!” He was pleading with the younger medic now. The poor kid seemed especially grieved at his patient’s distress. Come to think of it, Bonnie hadn’t seen him here before. “Ow! Wait, please!” The screams just kept coming. And then, just as he was loaded into the ambulance, Jim’s voice dropped slightly: “Lord, take me.”
Bonnie was never allowed to ride along in the ambulance. He always watched her through the windows as they pulled away. As the one known thing in his world got smaller and smaller, the despair on his face would break her wall of resolve, and Bonnie had many a good cry as she drove down to meet the ambulance at the valley hospital. But tonight, Bonnie did not cry. She grabbed her keys, stepped up into the truck, and cranked the engine. Had the sergeant been more grave than usual tonight? She pulled onto the dirt road behind the ambulance. As it turned onto the highway, it flipped on its lights and sirens and accelerated. Did they usually drive so fast? As she lost sight of the ambulance around the bend, Bonnie realized she was shivering.
“Lord,” she whispered, “let me see my Jim one last time.”