Cigarettes and Tasers; One of the First EMTs

We get sent to a nursing home for a “violent” patient. Cops have been notified. We find a man with no legs in a motorized wheelchair waving his fist at a nurse. Here’s the deal. He goes outside to smoke. Sometimes he ventures too far in his chair they are worried he is going to get hit by a car in the parking lot. Plus, his guardian doesn’t want him smoking so for his health they have put an electronic guard on his chair so when he approaches the front door it locks so he can’t get out. For him at least it’s about freedom and his cigarettes. Don’t mess with a man with no legs’s cigarettes.

The cops tell him since he threatened the nurse and threatened himself, or at least said his life wasn’t worth living, he has to go to the hospital for evaluation.

“Take me to jail,” he says.

The cops don’t want to take him to jail. They want him to go with us. He has called their bluff.

“I ain’t going,” he says.

“You’re not to win this argument,” one of the cops says. “There are five of us and one of you.”

“I ain’t going.”

“I’ve got a taser,” the cop says.

I’m about to suggest that I have Ativan and Haldol and maybe the chemical restraint will be a better idea if he is going to try to resist, but I can see the man is staring at the cop’s holster that holds the taser. He is probably picturing the same scene that I am. The cop tasering the guy. His body becoming rigid as the electricity shoots through him, his hair turning into an instant Afro. Peeing his pants. Biting his tongue.

“All right,” he says. “You going to see my chair gets put in my room?”

“We’ll take care of it,” the cop says.

“They’re a bunch of thieves here,” he says.

“We’ll keep it safe.”

“Fucking assholes won’t let me smoke,” he says as we head out to the ambulance.

**

We do a lift assist, a wait and return transfer from a nursing home to radiology, a diabetic with a sugar of 27, a police standby, a woman with a GI bleed.

***

Last call is a dialysis transfer. Guy has one leg and sores all over his body. He says he is a former EMT in the city – one of the first.