You taught me not to be afraid of death.
You wore a seat belt and obeyed the traffic laws.
You were side swiped by a sleepy truck driver on a sunny, breezy Sunday.
You were 28 years old, you said.
I can no longer recall your name.
You had blue eyes and a beach tan.
You told me about your wife and two daughters.
You wanted to show me their pictures, but they were in your wallet,
And we couldn't move you to reach it.
You smelled like barbecued chicken gone really bad.
I couldn't eat it for a year after your accident.
It was hard for me to want to wear a seat belt for a long time.
I kept thinking "what if my car caught on fire and I melted to the seat cushions?"
I've never owned a car with pleather seats because of you.
You cried when my partner told you the bad news -
That moving you would kill you, that not only were you smelted to the seat, but that you were crushed under the steering column and the only thing keeping you alive was the very car you were trapped in.
Your body from below the waist may have still been attached - I didn't look.
Sometimes I still wonder if it was.
I held your hand and you talked to me for a while.
It felt like a long time, but it was only a few minutes.
I don't remember everything you said, just that you were calm knowing you were dying.
And then you got sleepy.
The extinguished flames under the hood were still smoking, and you were peacefully falling asleep.
When your hand felt limp, I let you go.
Whatever your name was, I'm glad for being able to know you for a few minutes.
One call that I will always remember
There are a lot of things I could share with you about my life. Before I became a mother, I was a firefighter and an EMT, and had to bear witness to more than a few things that I would like to forget, but can’t. They are forever part of what makes me who I am… just because I was there.
It was the 80’s. This was a time before the days of wearing rubber gloves and face masks. EMT’s only wore rubber gloves if we knew were about to get really dirty - like elbow deep in alcohol-perfumed blood. AIDS was not a real crisis that people even wanted to be aware of yet, even though it had been in the news for probably 5 years already. We didn’t even know for sure how it was transmitted.
At the time I was 16 years old and having the time of my life being a normal and wild teenager. I didn’t know anything. I was fresh out of EMT class. Southside Virginia Emergency Crew had never had a female in their junior squad before. I went from being an only child to having 66 brothers in a day’s time.
The thing about having 66 brothers around you on a call is that they all think you can’t handle something gross, so my new mission was to show them I could handle what ever came my way. It may have been that attitude that caused me to develop a tiger personality that would suddenly appear when a call would come in. Something in me would flip like a light switch. I would be sitting around playing pool or watching TV, cutting up with the other members, and then a call would come in for a car accident on I-95 Northbound. FLIP. I think we all did it.
Car accidents were always smelly to me. Nine times out of ten, the smell was “alcoholic blood.” I’m 39 and have been out of the rescue squad work since I was 21, and the smell of it is still in my nose. The scenarios were mostly the same. The police were already there, the scene was secured with yellow tape or orange cones, and some poor fool was hollering “Oh, God this hurts! Get me out before I f— somebody up!” This was always a good thing to hear, because it meant they were awake and at least somewhat oriented. It was the silent ones that would keep me awake at night.
On Palm Sunday in April of 1986, a car accident on I-95 Southbound changed me forever. It was called into dispatch by a fellow EMT who happened to witness the wreck on his way home from church. Remember back in those days, we didn’t have cell phones. He called it in off of a interstate public emergency phone right by the Richmond-Petersburg toll booth. We were all sitting at the Yankee Coffee Shoppe in Petersburg, Virginia when it came in. Our unit that day was R-2. It needed a bath, and I was saying something to my driver Larry about it and taking a huge bite of my pancakes when the call came in. It’s funny how you remember the stupidest details about major life changing events. I was wearing my green and white uniform for the first time that day, instead of the canary yellow jumpsuit.
This car accident was different because it had been called in as a 10-40 involving spontaneous human combustion. Read that again if you have to, because the truth doesn’t change. I had never seen Larry drive like that before. I would go so far as to say I had never truly seen him flip his “light switch” before; at least not like that. My breathing was very slow as we drove to the call. I was doing my normal silent review of the ABC’s – airway, breathing, circulation – in my mind on the way. How to give support to the spine using your fingers behind the head, how to do CPR if need be, where each supply was in the back of the truck. The pancake syrup was still on my tongue.
The scene was like nothing I had ever been to. There was not 1 or 2 police units. There were 9. There was not 1 or 2 POV’s (personally owned vehicles) of EMT’s who were off duty but heard the call come in. There were an unbelievable 27. There were 4 family members of the accident victims standing on the gravel side of the road. One of them was a woman sobbing uncontrollably, and she was talking to the police officer who was stuck writing the report. That part was normal at least.
Out of all of wheeled units there, we were the first ambulance to arrive. R-1 came behind us. Larry stopped on a dime and told me that what ever happens I had to stay in the truck until he checked it out first. I remember getting so angry and yelling something ugly – and he ran to my door and locked it through the open window and shouted, “You gotta promise me you will stay in this truck!” I threw my arms up, shaking. I didn’t know what the big deal was. At that time, I didn’t know what spontaneous human combustion even meant. Various members ran by with equipment. It had been a good 5 minutes since we had first pulled up. I remember seeing Gene who was normally cool as a cucumber start screaming at one of the police officers. He was pointing at the other side of the car. Something about it was wrong -was it not secured correctly? It was my curiosity over what he was going off about that made me decide to not wait in the truck.
When you are with a partner for any length of time, you start to know each others thoughts and moves before you say and do them. Larry knew mine, and his eyes met me without any surprise or bewilderment of why I was suddenly standing behind him. In fact he was eerily calm. I knew right away what that meant. We had no work to do because the patient was dead. He walked a little closer to me and asked me the question that I think I had waited to hear since my first day volunteering as an EMT.
He said “Carolyn….are you ready to see this?”
I shrugged and said “of course, Larry. I’m not a baby. What’s the big deal?“
“I want you to remember this, Carolyn… I want you to lock this in your memory because you will never see this again. Do you understand?”
I looked at him kind of concerned. I had seen dozens of dead bodies by now. Behind his shoulder I could see the white sheet being draped over the remains that was just behind the crowd of people between Larry and the body. Funny though…I couldn’t see the body before they covered it.
“Yes, Larry I’m ready.” Famous last words.
My mind, that had been working frantically to register the sights, smells and sounds of the car accident, was now working to block it out. First I saw what Gene had been going off about. It was the body of a 5 year old boy who at first had been hidden by the toppled car. His little remains were covered by a sheet. My first thought was that the crumpled part of the sheet that was his body seemed smaller than it was supposed to be. The other sheet, the body of father who had been driving the car when he caught on fire, was crumpled up even less.
Things move so slowly when what you have to take for the truth doesn’t make any sense. Voices get garbled. It’s like you are looking at a snapshot taken with a camera set for a really long exposure. Larry and Gene looked at each other as if to ask themselves if what they were about to do was ethical. Then Gene lifted the sheet of the man who had been driving.
“Where’s the rest of him?” I asked them both. All that was there was his lower legs still wearing the remains of his pants, and his feet that wore the shoes and socks. The rest that had been hidden under the sheet was nothing but a burnt, sticky, black stain on the interstate. “That’s spontaneous human combustion, Carolyn – you’re lucky to see that. I’ll bet an EMT in the last 50 years hasn’t seen it.”
I wanted to say Gee, thanks Larry. I feel so privileged. Now watch me barf when we get back to base. But I just stood there, locking it into my memory. It didn’t really look like much to be honest. It was just the idea that took me to places I had never imagined before. A person could just light up like a wick, and be gone within a few minutes like a cigarette butt.
After seeing the body of the man, I was so shocked that it never even occurred to me until later on that I had not been shown the body of the child. I found out later that the reason why the child’s body was so short was that he had not been wearing a seat belt, had been thrown partially out of the vehicle and died from having being partially squashed flat. He was flat from the shoulders up. That was why he was too short. I guess my mentors wanted to keep me at least half way innocent for just a little longer.
It didn't matter. I was changed forever that day.
