Drunks 2

The second in a series of 3 on drunk cases.

“Medic 2, code 3 for an unknown medical, possible psychiatric problem.”

It was 2:30 in the morning and I rolled out of bed with a groan. I looked at the address on my pager: Warrenton. Great. I knew I’d be up for an hour, at least. I pulled my pants on, then sweatshirt, and finally my boots, then trudged out to the rig. My partner already had it running and put us en route as I climbed into the passenger seat. Dispatch repeated the address and nature of the call as we pulled onto the highway, our red and white strobes casting about us in the light fog.

We made for the roundabout, then south across the bay towards Warrenton. Rescue would be responding also, so I punched the SCAN key on the radio, but all was quiet—either they were already responding, or no one was. We’ll find out when we get there I thought to myself.

Going through Warrenton, we took a left at the main light, and shortly approached the scene. The fire department’s rescue unit was parked in the driveway of the single level house, its red rotators mixing with the pulsing blue and red of the police cars parked opposite the house. Everyone had come out for the show.

My partner marked us on scene, I pulled on a pair of exam gloves, then got out of the unit. We piled our equipment on the cot and wheeled towards the open front door. A police officer met stopped us short of going inside and gave me the rundown.

“So this kid shows up at these people’s home, completely drenched and drunk. He pounds on the door until they open up, then starts rambling about how it’s his parent’s place and he wants in. He’s in the living room, but he’s tweakin’ pretty good. I think he’s on mushrooms or meth.”

Our patient, a male in his early twenties, sits in a living room recliner. He’s dressed in his work uniform from a fast-food joint, soaked to the bone, and wrapped in one of FDs wool blankets. He’s fidgety and anxious, partly because he has no clue what’s going on, partly because the firemen are crowded around him, and partly (I thought) because he was high. I made a hole through the firemen, then crouch down so that I’m was at least eye level with him.

“Where are my parents?” he starts. “I don’t know who all these people are. What’s going on? Why are you all in my house?” He’s angry with us.

“Listen, partner. This isn’t your parent’s house. You woke up some poor folks and they called us. We’re going to take you to the hospital to figure this out.”

I questioned him some, tried to figure out what he’d been up to. He thought it was only 11pm. He didn’t know how he’d gotten to this house, if he’d gotten into an accident at all, or if any one had been with him. He denied drug use and—image this—denied drinking. He still thought it was his place and we had to argue back and forth a little that the homeowners had no idea who he was. I think at some level, he finally just gave up the fight and allowed us to walk him over the cot. It was when we started to put the seatbelts on him that things start to get out of hand.

“What the fuck is going on?! Fuck you people! I want to know what’s happening!”

Now, most everyone there knew my rules and I made no hesitation to educate the patient. Forcefully and sternly I told him, “you need to watch your mouth. You need to calm down and cooperate with us, or things are going to turn out badly for you.”

He was still angry, but he apologized through clenched teeth and we continued to belt him in. During this time, he’d lost a pocket full of change and as I bent down to collect it for him, he opened his mouth again. “Look at me! You need to tell me what the fuck is going on!” When I raised my head up to look at him, he was pointing his finger at me and he was red faced with anger.

“Listen. That’s your second warning about your language. You dropped your money and I was picking it up for you. We’re taking you to the hospital because you’ve had too much to drunk and you don’t know what happened tonight. Calm down, trust me, and cooperate, or things will not go good for you.”

But it didn’t stop, his bad attitude and loud mouth persisted. We had a 15 minute transport time ahead of his, so after we loaded the patient, I told my partner to just get going, that I’d handle everything in route.

Several times during the transport, he’d go from compliant and amicable to verbally combative and verbally abusive. At one point, he took his cell phone out of his pocket and after finding the battery dead, threw it against the rear doors. This was the point that I thought that’s it. I opened up my drug kit and pulled out the ampule of inapsine and a 5cc syringe. I had one eye on the patient and the other on the drug as I drew up the sedative.

“ Whoa, hey! What are you doing! What the fuck are you going to stick in me? You’re not sticking me what that fucking needle!”

“If you don’t calm down and get your language under control, that's exactly what will happen.”

“Are you trying to threaten me?”

“Nope, just giving you fair warning.”

And warning it was. Look, this is the way I see it. When you watch Cops on TV and they bring a suspect back to their car, they tell them to put their hands on the hood and not to move. After a few seconds, the suspect will take his hands off the hood and try to reason with the cop. The cop will warn him to put his hands back on the hood. This repeats three or four times before the cop finally cuffs the suspect and sits him on the curb. The cop does this to control the scene—he does this by controlling the suspect and thereby controlling his safety. My tact with this kid was the same—I needed to control the environment to keep myself safe.

Lucky for him, he kept his mouth shut and his hands to himself for the rest of the transport and the syringe of inapsine sat next to me on the bench. We unloaded him at the ER bay, and while he looked angry as a hornet, he still kept his mouth shut. The ER nurses had prepped the psych room for him and waited for my partner and I to transfer him to the ER cot, only he wasn’t getting off of the cot.

“I’m not getting off this fucking thing until somebody tells me what’s going on!”

He had a death grip on head bar of the cot and he’d spread his legs, wrapping his feet around the frame of the Stryker. We tried doing to easy things at first, just lifting him over using the bed sheet, but he wouldn’t budge. And so my patience broke. I forcefully unwrapped his feet, roughly slamming his legs back onto the cot, then I loosed his grip, throwing his arms back onto his chest. Then we roughly tossed him to the ER cot in a kind of “1-2-3-heave!” motion.

Afterwards, I told me partner “sorry. I know I lost my cool, but guys like that really just piss me off.”

“You know, you were way too nice to him,” he replied.

Too nice, huh. I guess I’d broken my own rule. I should have used to inapsine, drawn up and sitting next to me on the bench, as it was.