Silent Siren, page 4
We zip what remains of the man in a fluid-impervious heavy black body bag and carry him to the coroner’s wagon. In all, I spent eight hours at that house, arriving on scene as an EMT, leaving it as a coroner’s assistant.
Coitus Interruptus
The call is to south Bainbridge Island for a diabetic problem. These calls always worry me because I never know what I will walk in on. All that is known is that the person is a diabetic and (surprise, surprise) has a problem. I have gone in on such a dispatch to find a patient who is profoundly septic with gangrene. One call that came in as a diabetic problem turned out to be a full cardiac arrest. My partner and I had been by ourselves for the first ten minutes of that call.
We arrive at what could be described as a homestead or family compound. Though the family has been on the island for many years, most of them are far from model citizens. A daughter had been murdered, a son had DUIs and assault charges to his name, and the entire family seemed dysfunctional in one way or the other.
At the end of a long, creaky staircase is a dimly lit room with a bare bulb and a mattress on the floor. On it reclines a middle-aged woman, thin, naked, and unconscious. Her eyes, one of which appears to be made of glass, are open and staring at weird angles to the ceiling. Sweat beads on her forehead and she snores sonorously. A flustered man stands in the corner of the room, attempting to zip up his pants. The smell of sweat hangs in the air. A half-empty tube of KY jelly lies crumpled on a rickety nightstand, cap removed, drooling its contents. A fan whirrs weakly in the corner, as if in a vain attempt to dissipate the funky atmosphere of a room with no ventilation.
“What happened?” asks the medic.
“Uh…” the man says sheepishly. “She’s a diabetic and…and we were, you know, and she just went out on me!”
We poke the woman’s finger. She doesn’t flinch. A drop of blood beads on her index finger. Her blood sugar is low—22, normal being 70-110. She had taken her insulin as prescribed, but, having expended her glucose stores in vigorous activity, lapsed into insulin shock.
We start an IV of D5W (sugar water) and administer an amp of D50. Several seconds pass and the woman stirs. The sweat begins to dry on her chest and forehead. Her eyes blink, signaling the return of consciousness.
“Cheryl!” shouts the half-dressed man.
“Yeah?” the woman blurts and reflexively pulls a sheet up to her neck.
I shut off the drip, remove the IV catheter from her bony arm, apply a bandage, and pack up my gear.
“You’ll want to eat a sandwich before you…” The medic trails off. “That sugar we gave you won’t last long.”
The woman nods and grasps for a pair of underwear that had been flung on the floor.
We pack up our gear, chuckling as we negotiate the stairs back down to the rig.
Hell of a way to wake up.
Rats!
The call comes over the radio as “apparent DOA” on Seaborn Road. I respond in one of the personnel vehicles to the south end of the island. The dispatcher tells us to switch to Tac 3, our tactical channel, reserved for situations in which we don’t want something sensitive going over the main frequency.
“Be advised there are rats in the residence,” she says.
I’m not sure why this is relevant yet, but it will become abundantly clear as the call unfolds.
I arrive on scene just as the medic unit clears—too late for me to do anything productive. Not that there’s much to do on a DOA anyway. They’ve already officially declared the person dead, but I’m curious. Some would say morbid. I stuck around for the investigation.
The woman was in her seventies, and, according to a neighbor, hadn’t left the house in decades. She had her food delivered to her and placed on the doorstep. The only time she was seen was once daily when she would make her way to the front to pick up her food. A retired attorney, she had no known relatives. Neighbors hadn’t seen her come out to pick up her food in about five days. They had become concerned and called 911. Police said they had checked the residence thoroughly the previous night but found no sign of her. This morning, a neighbor had come over, discovered her, and called again.
The house, once white, now slightly green with moss accumulation, is flanked by thick brush that obscures the windows, now opaque with dirt and algae. Lt. Chris Jensen from Bainbridge Police stands outside the house. It’s never a good sign when police officers stand outside. It usually means they want to spend as little time as possible inside. Likely something gruesome awaits us. Even worse is when cops are smoking stogies in the driveway.
The door is ajar, but only slightly, because as it swings inwards, it abuts a mountain of garbage that runs the full length of the house. I step through the narrow aperture sideways and find that it is no warmer or lighter inside the house than it was outside on a cold mid-winter’s day in January. To either side of me, newspapers dating back to the 1950s form moldy stacks that tower to the ceiling. All manner of discarded household accoutrements are mixed in with elderly newspapers, including cast-off adult diapers forming fetid strata in a man-made fossil record, a monument to loneliness and neglect. I continue my crabwalk down the hallway and my jumpsuit brushes up against the mildewed newspapers, leaving green-white streaks on the navy-blue fabric. Only about two feet of useable space remains in the hallway, forming a track that leads through the entire one-story residence.
If somebody is indeed dead in this firetrap, no signs of him or her are obvious to the eyes or to the nose. My olfactory sense is overwhelmed by the rancid odor of garbage. I catch a glimpse of a radiator, buried under an unidentifiable pile of rubbish. Had it been on, this place would have burned long ago. The bathroom appears not to have been used in some time, owing to the multitude of adult diapers and their containers among the heaps of debris. Two inches of feces encrust the toilet bowl, base, and the surrounding floor. How does a person get to such a point of despair and loneliness?
Chris Jensen is ahead of me with his flashlight. He narrates as he walks. “Lady’s in her seventies, hasn’t left the house in decades. Neighbor would see her once a day when she went to the front porch to pick up her food that Meals on Wheels delivered. She hadn’t been seen in a few days, so they got concerned. We did a welfare check out here last night. Looked everywhere but couldn’t find her. I guess the neighbor knew where she hung out and found her this morning.”
He shines the beam into a room to our left, where garbage is heaped two-thirds of the way to the ceiling.
“You see her?” he says, indicating with his light the entire pile of trash.
“No.”
“She’s three feet in front of you. See the little white tuft of hair?”
I’m reminded of a master hunter handing his binoculars to a novice—See! That’s an elk. Down there by that stream beside the rock!
I still see nothing but old clothing, cracker boxes, used diapers, and plates with half-eaten food. “There.” He points.
Now I see her. Lying flat on her back atop a mountain of her own making is a tiny old woman, her hair as white as a Q-tip, blending in with the trash. She clutches a bottle of aspirin in one hand. One eye is missing and half of her face is eaten down to the bone, almost anatomically dissected by shallow scalloping wounds made by tiny sharp teeth. There is no blood, only rat feces left on the garbage beside her. Her right arm is skeletonized as well, the bones, ligaments, and tendons clearly visible to the elbow. I’m glad it’s winter and cold. Otherwise the smell would have been overpowering.
I stay until Aaron from the Coroner’s Office arrives. It is impossible to carry her body through the front door, so we decide to take her out through the open window in the bedroom, the upper part of which is level with Mount Garbage. We borrow a neighbor’s machete. Chris hacks through the thick brush that obscures the window and then uses a crowbar to pry it open. I doubt it’s been opened in over a decade. The dead woman is placed on a slender metal device called a clam shell and conveyed through the open window to the shrouded stretcher below.
Weeks passed, and nobody claimed the dead woman’s body. Finally, she is cremated at the expense of the county and buried with the remains of other indigents. What could have gone so terribly wrong in her life to cause a successful lawyer to separate from her family and live alone, in a den of her own filth?
Even if a neighbor or friend had tried to get help for the woman, there would have been no guarantee that she would accept it. It was, after all, her right to live her life the way she wanted, no matter how filthy and disorganized it seemed.
The house is sealed by the coroner and its ownership transferred to the Assessor’s Office. Some time later, it is stripped to the studs and completely renovated, and then auctioned off to the public.
I wonder if the new owners would know the history behind their house. Would they care?
Aircraft Down
The tones jar me awake at 0500 hours. A forty-two-year-old woman is in active labor. It’s my turn to stay behind and man the radio as Medic 21 speeds off to the call. We have a hyper-card mapping program that allows us to pinpoint every address on Bainbridge Island and relate that information to the responding crew, i.e. “fourth driveway on the left after turning onto Bucklin Hill Road.” The program actually shows the shape of driveways and provides notes that allow us to know if a driveway is too narrow for an engine or if it is longer than the standard length of four-inch supply hose we have on our hose beds.
It’s September 11, 1995, still six years before the tragic events that transpired in New York City, but the date would prove to be ominously coincidental.
Randy is the lead paramedic assessing the patient who, at forty-two years old, is deemed high-risk for pregnancy complications. She requests to be transported to Swedish Hospital in Seattle. Since there would be a significant delay before the next ferry boat, Randy makes the decision to call for helicopter transport to the hospital.
Airlift Northwest is used with some regularity. Since Harborview Medical Center in Seattle is the only Level One trauma center in the region, all patients with life-threatening or potentially life-threatening injuries are sent there, and the quickest route is often by helicopter. Many physicians on the Island have privileges at Seattle hospitals, so, in the event of a serious medical emergency, patients are transported there as well.
I get the phone call in the radio room at the fire station, and call up Airlift’s dispatch to request a chopper to respond to the helipad at the front of our fire station. We had recently moved our air operations from the high school football field to the station. Access was much easier, and it allowed someone to stand by the main radio while waiting for the helicopter.
As is standard for air operations, I drive Engine 21 to the driveway adjacent to the helipad. In case the helicopter was to catch fire on takeoff or landing, Engine 21 was equipped with firefighting foam to fight fires ignited by jet fuel.
Medic 21 arrives at the helipad, Captain Dick Hannon at the wheel. Randy is in the back with the patient, whose contractions are now very close together. Dense fog blankets the station, and we wait in the darkness for the familiar whirring of the Augusta 109 helicopter’s jet engine.
The minutes tick by and no helicopter arrives. Captain Hannon squints into the night sky, scanning for the twinkling white and red tail rotor lights, cocking his head in an attempt to hear the sound of an approaching jet engine cutting through sky. It’s taking too long.
“Call Airlift dispatch and see what their ETA is,” he says.
I walk into the brightly lit radio room and pick up the phone to contact Airlift Northwest. The dispatcher’s stress is palpable as he says, “I’ve lost contact with the helicopter.”
I relay the information to Dick and he instructs me to drive Engine 21 to Bainbridge High School to see if the helicopter may have unexpectedly changed landing zones to the football field. Upon rounding the corner to the track, no helicopter is in sight. I turn on the stadium lights anyway, just in case they choose to land there.
Back at Station 21, volunteers have begun to arrive. Hastily dressed men spurred to action by the radio traffic clutch their pagers and huddle around the radio room as though it were a campfire, waiting for word. Nobody wants to speak what is on everyone’s mind. Something has happened to the helicopter.
Soon information begins to trickle in from the community. A waterfront resident had heard helicopter blades and then a “boom” at about 0530 hours. The explosion seemed to originate from Eagle Harbor, about a mile into the water off Bainbridge Island.
Arrangements are made for ground transportation to Harrison Hospital in Bremerton and the woman is transferred into Bainbridge Island Ambulance while Randy and Dick stand by at the station in case any survivors are located. Bainbridge Fire Boat 21 is sent to look for the downed helicopter.
I ride along in Bainbridge Ambulance 21 to assist with patient care, alongside EMT Rena Clough. The woman’s contractions are two minutes apart and strong. She won’t make it to the hospital forty minutes away without delivering. Rena makes the decision to do a paramedic intercept at Poulsbo Fire Department’s headquarters station fifteen minutes away.
The Poulsbo paramedic is ready for action as he climbs into Ambulance 21, wearing latex gloves and safety glasses. At 0640 hours, the woman delivers a healthy baby boy as Ambulance 21 idles in the parking lot of Station 81.
Boat 21 recovers the bodies of the two Airlift Nurses, Marna Fleetwood and Amy Riebe, along with pieces of wreckage. The body of the pilot, Lee Bothwell, is never found, and assumed to be at the bottom of the Puget Sound, possibly still at the helm of what remains of the Italian-made Augusta 109 helicopter. An investigation will later reveal that Bothwell became disoriented in the limited visibility and plunged the aircraft straight into the water. Boat 21’s volunteer crew drinks heavily that night.
I am interviewed by the local news that evening and remark on the juxtaposition of life and death that occurred that dark and foggy morning. Three lives were lost in an instant; another life began shortly thereafter, under such ironic circumstances.
For years thereafter, I would see the mother and her son from time to time in downtown Bainbridge Island. She always smiled at me, recognizing my role in the serendipitous start to her child’s life. What a story that child would have when he became old enough to comprehend how he came into this world.
A memorial garden now sits adjacent to the helipad. A stone bearing a plaque with the names of all three onboard stands next to a bench—a place of quiet contemplation. Three pathways composed of cement pavers lead away from the garden and then vanish into the lush green grass, a testament to three heroes who lost their lives in the service of others.
Stinker
It’s the middle of August and ninety degrees outside. My brother, also a volunteer firefighter, and I are at my parents’ house in South Bainbridge Island when we get the call.
“Bainbridge Fire, response for a full arrest, 1809 Pleasant Beach Drive,” the radio attached to my belt squawks. Ben and I head out the door to my car. A cardiac arrest always brings the volunteers. It is a manpower-intensive event and an adrenaline rush as well—as sick as a person can get.
We head down Baker Hill Road and I plug in my green dash strobe light. Some people pull over for volunteer fire lights. Perhaps others, wondering at the odd color, are not sure what to make of it. Since my car is a blue 1991 Ford Crown Victoria and resembles a police car, we don’t run into any trouble getting to the scene.
On the way to the call, I think I can make out the dispatcher saying “Patient just discovered in his vehicle. Possibly down one week,” but it is hard to tell. Reception is bad on the south end.
On arrival, we are met by an overweight man wearing an ill-fitting T-shirt that fails to contain his ample abdominal girth. He is holding a rag to his face as we exit the vehicle with our aid kit. “You won’t need that,” the man says, indicating our aid box. “He’s in the back of his van. He’s all bloated up and he hasn’t got any clothes on. I hadn’t seen him for a while and the neighbors complained about a smell, so I broke out the back window and found him.”
I recognize an ancient, junk-filled station wagon parked beside the old step-van as belonging to Cecil Thompson, a seventy-four-year-old man I had previously transported for heart problems. I had remembered seeing him shopping at Safeway, hunched over his cart, always dressed the same way, in blue overalls and a baseball cap, with extremely old hearing aids connected to a transmitter in his overalls pocket.
Much as I dread the prospect, I need to do the responsible thing and confirm death by visual inspection. I had never before seen a decomposed human being and I am about to have my rude introduction in the summer heat. Wisely, my brother decides to stay back at the car. His lifesaving skills will not be needed on my morbid expedition.
Holding my breath for as long as possible, I climb into the front of the step van and pull back the curtain separating the front from the back. The sun casts light into the van. As though inflated with a bicycle pump, Mr. Thompson sits bloated and slowly dissolving into a vinyl bench in the van’s rear. Maggots writhe along his discolored legs, blistered with pockets of decomposition fluid. His scrotum is swollen with body gas to the size of a cantaloupe. A tiny, dirty dog whimpers pitifully at his side.
I turn and run back to my car, letting out my long-held breath as I go. Volunteer firefighters begin to swarm into the driveway like the flies that orbit the dead man. I make a “four” with my left hand, indicating Code 4, our code for no further units needed on scene. I compose myself as best as possible and go back to interview the homeowner.
As it turned out, Mr. Thompson was homeless and was allowed to live in his van on the property. The caller said that he thought Mr. Thompson worked on small gas engines in his van and that he would putter in there without being seen for days.
