Heroin

Home after seventeen hours. I am beat down. It wasn't even that busy. Four calls is all. Still, it's an accumulation of calls, of days.

Three more nursing home calls. A chest pain, a pnemonia and a man just not feeling well. The chest pain was the same lady I brought in a week ago. Same complaint. I asked what the hospital found out the last time. The nurse was unaware she had even been sent in. She found the discharge paperwork that basically said they couldn't find anything wrong. Same complaint today. She is tired with a heavy chest. She has Alzhiemers and keeps saying. I don't know why I feel so bad. I have a pacemaker.

The last guy felt bad for three days and wasn't eating or taking his meds. He was 79. What's wrong with him? my partner asked. I just wanted to say, he's old and tired.

The one non-nursing home call today was for a man found unresponsive by his wife. They updated us en route saying he had vomited, but was semi-responsive. The guy was on the kitchen floor. He could answer questions but seemed sluggish. He had hurt his shoulder a few weeks ago, had surgery and was on pain meds. I was guessing he'd taken too many meds and maybe washed them down with some liquor. I couldn't smell any liquor, but he seems just like a homeless man in his demeanor. What struck was here we were in this brand new home -- so new it hardly had any furniture in it, and instead of a paved walk, we'd had to pull the stretcher in over gravel -- and here was this guy with a well dressed wife, and he seemed in his faded jeans and grey tee-shirt and flushed face to be just a street man. He looks up at her and says, sorry. We got him up on the stretcher and we were starting out the door when suddenly the wife, who has gone into the bathroom, says, hold on a minute, and she comes out of the bathroom. Heroin.

She is beside herself, she is so angry. The officer asks her if this is something he regulary does. She says no -- he's been clean for almost sixteen years -- since before she met him. She's says he used to be an addict, he'd been upfront about his past to her, but he had been a good man in the time she had known him. He didn't even drink. She says she could kill him.

She comes to the hospital with us, riding in the front, She asks if he is okay. I tell her he'll be all right.

She just cries. She says he's been depressed. His son died recently, he's been out of work with his injury. He's had no money. They have a new home and can't afford to put anything in it.

He's beaten this before, I say, he can do it again. Don't be too hard on him.

I could just kill him, she says, but not as harsh this time.

After we leave them in an ER room, I come back later and glance in. She sits next to his bed, leaning against him, her head against his shoulder, his big arm around her. He brushes her hair. Niether of them speak.