Silent Siren, page 14
Monty takes a multitude of measurements and photographs as I bundle the man up on the cot and place him in the truck. We head back to the morgue through rush hour traffic, check him into the office, and slide him into the cooler.
One method for finding next-of-kin is to peruse a decedent’s cell phone contacts. Even if a relative is not explicitly listed, we can call friends and usually obtain that information. Jane Jorgenson is just coming on shift when we arrive, so she aids us with our investigation by checking the man’s cell phone for next-of-kin clues.
Jane finds the last number the dead man dialed, right about as the accident occurred. She presses “send.”
“Welcome to Rough Riders,” the voice on the other hand intones. Jane reddens. She has discovered the last, apparently very distracting, phone call the dead man ever made, a call to a gay chat line.
We won’t tell the family about this one.
Another Transition
In time, I grew restless at King County Medical Examiner’s Office. What I thought was my niche had become routine, even boring at times. Body after stinking, leaky body came through our doors and up the creaky elevator to the forty-two-degree cooler with the sticky floors. I was bogged down in paperwork and the minutiae of a job that required intense legal documentation. Not that this wasn’t necessary. It was, but I began to feel that I wasn’t doing what I needed to do with my life. What could I do for a teenage girl killed in a car accident? I could convey the news as gently as I could to her loving parents. I could relay the sordid details of her last moments. I could discuss the results of her autopsy, with words like “blunt force trauma to the head” and “acute ethanol intoxication” but I couldn’t bring much solace to the victims’ families. I was there to bear witness and to put (literally) the pieces together, to provide “closure” as the old cliché goes, but I still missed the career I had left—paramedicine.
At times I felt reviled, as though I were a leper. As we made our way to calls in our tan death-wagon, many averted their eyes. Even the police didn’t make eye contact. I longed for the ability to once again make decisions based on my medical background and felt stymied by the red tape of investigation.
The King County Medical Examiner’s Office was very political and power struggles existed between pathologists, investigators, and autopsy staff. On one occasion, I was called in to the program director’s office because I had not brought with me from a scene medications that a pathologist wanted to look at. The death was suspected to be natural, and the only reason we had brought the body of the fifty-five -year-old man into the office was that we were unable to get a hold of his personal doctor to sign a death certificate. As it turned out, the pathologist reviewing the case decided to autopsy the body, something I didn’t expect. When the lab results from urine samples came back six weeks later, abnormally high, but not lethal, levels of a prescription drug were found in the man’s bloodstream. The pathologist had looked for any medicine bottles that I had brought in and, not finding them, became angry and complained to his supervisor, the chief medical examiner, who passed the complaint on to the program director. Another time, several photographs I took at a rainy, stormy accident scene proved too blurry for the autopsy staff’s liking, so I and a seasoned investigator had to undergo “camera retraining” or as I like to put it, “Camera-gate.”
One day, as I walked up Madison Street to begin my night shift at the ME’s office, Seattle Fire Department Medic Ten rounded the corner and came down the hill, lights flashing and dual sirens blaring. I recognized the paramedics. I had worked under their tutelage in school. As the sirens faded off into the distance, I thought to myself, “I used to do that. I used to be a paramedic.” A lump formed in my throat. I began to formulate a plan to get myself back in the field again as a medic.
Though I continued to work as a backup paramedic for Bainbridge Island Fire Department during my tenure at King County ME’s office, I realized I was rapidly losing my skills. I no longer felt confident in my medical decisions and felt that my hard-earned education was slipping away. After six months at the ME’s office, I resigned to concentrate on testing for fire departments and ambulance services.
The Removalist
I took a part-time job with a Mortuary service south of Seattle while I worked at getting back on my feet as a paramedic. Since I got excellent recommendations from King County ME’s office, it wasn’t difficult to secure the job. The work was much more basic than the one I had at the ME’s office. It consisted of being a sub-contractor for other funeral homes in the Seattle area, doing body removals and either delivering to the client funeral home or to our own facility, sited in a warehouse that contained two coolers, each of which could hold a hundred bodies, a large embalming room, and four rumbling crematory machines that heated the building quite well in the winter.
I wore a suit, as opposed to a uniform, and the job was, in general, quite a bit cleaner than the one I had just left. Bodies were wrapped tightly in plastic and taped shut. No decomposition fluid accumulated on the floor of the cooler, and my shoes felt a whole lot cleaner, no longer sticky with unidentifiable muck.
The owner was a retired death investigator for a major metropolitan medical examiner’s office, so he knew the business well. A type-A personality who was constantly on the go and sucked down cigarettes like there was no tomorrow, he was nonetheless a gracious, friendly employer. It was easy to work for him.
Heavy Duty
Though she is only twenty-eight years old, the woman brought into our mortuary by bariatric stretcher weighs a staggering seven hundred pounds.
Our techs used a full-size Dodge van and a Stryker stretcher with a 1000-pound capacity to convey the corpulent and edematous corpse from Virginia Mason Medical Center’s Intensive Care Unit to our cavernous, forty-eight-degree cooler.
Today, she and a couple of stuffed animals she held dear are being cremated, and it will be no small task, for very few crematories in Washington State are equipped to accommodate a body of this size. For this special occasion, the cremationist has rented out a fork-lift and rallied the day crew for the exacting task of placing the body into the glowing crematory retort.
The woman, so large she requires two plastic body bags, one on top of the other, rests on a massive wooden pallet. Only a small part of her flesh peeks out from between folds of plastic—a pale thigh and ankle, with two identification tags lashed together to accommodate the circumference of her lower leg. A cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, the cremationist places the forks under the pallet. The engine labors as he lifts the forks to a load position and drives the forklift towards the retort. This is an image I will not soon forget.
The idea is to place a cardboard roller just inside the retort, level the pallet with the entrance to the retort and then four of us would give a mighty shove, praying she made it all the way in on the first try. There is no room for error. The retort is glowing hot and emits a low roar as the cremationist pushes a button on the front of Retort #2 and the heavy steel door opens, revealing a rectangular space that resembles an oversized pizza oven. If we get the pallet a bit sideways and run into a side wall, the woman will be stuck half in and half out of the retort, igniting spontaneously in that position and creating a massive catastrophe.
Like a dock worker loading freight onto a ship, the cremationist squares the forklift with the retort door, idles the machine, puffs on his cigarette, and says, “You all ready for this?”
I take my place on one side of the pallet and, together with the other three techs, propel the palleted corpse into the retort. Plastic crinkles as it begins to melt. Quickly, the cremationist shuts the door.
Within three hours, the seven hundred-pound woman and her stuffed animals are reduced to eight pounds of ash and ground bone fragments contained in a plastic box the size of a toaster.
I imagine that the woman, even in her wildest dreams, could not conceive of being conveyed to her final disposition via forklift. Whether by misfortune or volition, she had grown to such a size that heavy equipment was needed to dispose of her remains. At least now, though, she was free of the ponderous body that had been her constant and unwelcome companion for nearly three decades.
The Mummy
Traffic in front of me isn’t budging an inch. Not that this will make much of any difference to the man we are about to pick up. He is dead, but I am tired and just want to go home. My cell phone is jammed between my right ear and an aching shoulder, tightened from stress and non-stop driving. I am trying to scribble directions on a tiny piece of paper affixed to my thigh while I attempt to steer and hold a McDonald’s cheeseburger with my left hand.
I take advantage of the stopped traffic and gnaw off a bite of the burger along with a piece of the wrapper. Extra fiber.
The dispatcher reads off the sheet of paper in front of her, “Possibly dead a month. You’ll be transporting back here and holding for Hoffner’s. Billy will meet you there.”
The lunch rush abates some and traffic begins to move somewhat. I let my foot off the brake and give the wipers a quick swipe to clear the light December drizzle from the windshield.
“A month? And the ME turfed this?”
I try to wrap my brain around what someone would look like after having been dead a month, un-embalmed, in a private residence. I can’t imagine he’d be recognizable. Wouldn’t he be a tarry black bug-infested lump by now? From my time at the Medical Examiner’s Office, I knew that in most cases of a prolonged downtime, the body is unidentifiable by photograph and the Medical Examiner assumes jurisdiction in order to definitively establish identity by dental records or X-rays.
The dispatcher continues in her dry monotone, “That’s just what I’m getting from Hoffner’s.” She gives me an address in west Seattle, a contact number for the police officer on scene, and hangs up.
Hoffner, Fisher, and Harvey Funeral Home may have requested us instead of going themselves because it’s the weekend, maybe because it sounds unpleasant. In either case, our mortuary service is the workhorse of the Seattle removal scene, always there to do the unpleasant jobs nobody else wants to do.
Billy’s gray Astrovan is already there as I pull up to the curb of a modest, unlit, mossy house. A Seattle Police Officer, gray-haired and slightly pudgy, directs us into the home, arms crossed, seemingly indifferent or simply bored.
The dead man’s nieces and nephews are outside. They had come to check on Uncle Bill when he never showed up for any holiday festivities.
“The smell isn’t too bad,” the officer says.
The house has the typical musty odor of a lonely shut-in. Cigarettes are scattered in ashtrays, on the edges of tables, and in bowls on card tables, kitchen counters, and TV trays. Crushed beer cans litter the floor.
The windows are open for ventilation and it’s cool in the house now though Seattle Police tells us when they entered on the initial call, all the windows were shut tight and the heat was turned up to eighty degrees. Indeed, the smell isn’t too bad. Only a faint odor of decomposition competes with the musty aroma of loneliness.
The dead man lies face-up in the hallway, covered by a quilt, his sock-clad feet protruding into the kitchen. I lift up the quilt and take a look at him.
He wears an open button-up plaid shirt over a white T-shirt. With the exception of his socks, he is naked from the waist down. His underwear lies nearby, discarded for an unknown reason.
Why is it I find so many old people wearing nothing but a T-shirt? It reminds me of Donald Duck, prancing around in front of his nephews, wearing only his dapper little jacket and a bow tie, his tail feathers sticking out.
The dead man’s skin is the color and texture of old leather, his facial features shrunken from dehydration, his nose peaked.
Instead of bloating the way most bodies do when they decompose, this man has become tiny and dry—mummified. Presumably the high heat and low humidity produced by his cranked-up heater and closed-tight windows created a natural mummy. Because he had kept all windows and doors closed, flies were unable to enter and lay their eggs. He exhibits no insect activity whatsoever.
I find the man’s driver’s license and place it next to his face. Because he mummified rather than decomposed, he is still recognizable after having been dead a month—right up to the white goatee beard.
Billy and I lay the plastic sheet on the cot and lower it to the ground. Together we pick up the mummified man and wrap him tightly for the ride to the mortuary where he will remain until the funeral home comes to pick him up on Monday.
Academy
Early in 2006, I made the decision to better my skills as a firefighter and make myself a more competitive candidate for firefighter/paramedic jobs by attending the Washington State Fire Academy in North Bend, Washington. To prepare myself physically, I took to more intense weight training, and running three miles, rain or shine, on the roads near my house.
The academy started in February and winter was still in full swing in North Bend. The instructors didn’t waste any time getting us out onto the drill field. By the second day of the first week we were laying a hose in the heavy snow and then loading it back up again on the engines, our fingers wet, numb, and freezing.
As the first week continued, we rolled five-inch diameter supply hose in the snow, creating hybrid hose roll/snow balls that were so heavy, it took two people to lift them. We practiced drills in which we were divided into companies—a ladder crew, a primary fire attack team, a backup team, and a search team. The hoses were stiff and beginning to freeze as we picked them up, and then it was into the chow hall for some artery-clogging but energy-giving food provided to us by the jolly old matron that had been working there since the dawn of time.
In the mornings, we gathered in our sweatpants with our stocking caps and our gloves on and marched from our quarters the mile or so to the drill field at 0500 hours, shouting cadences through chapped and numbed lips. Then it was a half-hour of PT before we donned our bunker gear, still soggy and cold from the previous day, and marched out to the drill field where we would begin eight hours of drilling a day.
The following weeks provided a review of hose appliances, primary fire attack, ventilation, extrication, forcible entry, Rapid Intervention Team techniques, and hazardous materials. Week five, as I recall, was the toughest—ladder week. Not just a day, but an entire week of practice raising 24-foot, 35-foot, and 45-foot ladders. By the end of the week, our shoulders were bruised and our hands ached. Still, it was an achievement to have made the half-way mark and passed, quite possibly the most brutal week of the academy.
There were exams as well, at least once a week, covering the International Fire Service Training Association’s Essentials of Fire Fighting. I did well on the tests and finished in the top ten of the class. Chief Omlid, known to the class as Yoda, was a retired fire chief who taught at the academy and was almost autistic in his ability to remember obscure firefighting facts and figures. We were tested on his knowledge as well.
Multi-company operations comprised the final week before graduation. During this period, we put all of the skills we had acquired during the previous nine weeks into play in live fire scenarios. Pallets blazed hotly, and smoke filled the training towers as we hauled the stiff hoses around corners, made entry into fire rooms, and extinguished blaze after blaze.
In April of 2006, I graduated from the Fire Academy with the certificates of Firefighter I and Hazardous Materials Operations level. Miraculously, everybody that had started in our academy made it through. Nobody washed out. I was proud of my hard-won achievement, another feather in my cap that would, I hoped, make it easier for me to land a fire job and be back doing what I was meant to do.
IV. Skagit County
“Hold my beer, Earl. Watch this!”
- Last words of a redneck
Skagit County
In the months that followed my graduation from the Washington State Fire Academy, I went back to work for First Call Plus, but only a couple of days a week. I wanted to spend a considerable amount of time searching for full-time employment in EMS. It wasn’t easy.
I tested for many different departments but knew that every time I made it to an interview, my ragged resume was difficult to explain. Some interviews felt like interrogations. I wanted to leave in the middle of one interview with a local fire department, in which I felt that the panel members were simply going through the motions, with no interest in hiring me. In another interview, I noticed that the chief to my right on the interview panel was picking his nose and then examining his findings with great interest. In University Place’s testing process, I made it to a chief’s interview—almost a formality before I was actually hired. I thought this was it, but it was not to be. Inexplicably, communication dropped off and I never heard from U.P. again until I inquired about two weeks later. The woman who answered the phone said the chief had decided on another candidate. I knew that my experience at Shoreline was a black mark on my record, but I wanted to give it just one more try.
In the winter of 2007, I applied for a position as a paramedic with Central Skagit Medic One, an agency based an hour north of Seattle. I told myself that this was the last paramedic position I would attempt. I wasn’t willing to go back to the hell that was private ambulance, and I was already checking into mortuary schools as a backup plan.
The testing process was rigorous, with a written test, multiple patient care scenarios, and interviews. I had spent considerable time polishing my interview skills and practicing scenarios, so I knew I was ready. I knew I did well; I just didn’t know how well until I received a phone call from Jada at the EMS office for me to come in to meet with her and the Operations Manager.
