The call is for a GSW. The address is familiar. I did another gun shot there many years ago. When we pulled in that night, everyone was running out the doors, while we ran in. The D.J. was on the ground, shot in the chest. He’d spun his last disc.

But this time it’s different. It isn’t night, it’s a Sunday morning, and people aren’t running out, they are standing up singing. It’s isn’t a nightclub anymore, it’s a church.

“He’s shot in the head and he won’t go to the hospital,” a church member tells me, as he leads us through the church and the singing congregation. “He’s up here,” he says pointing to a room off the main church floor.

I am thinking, this I have to see. I am expecting to walk into a horror movie and see a zombie hulk smoking a cigarette with half his head missing and brain and blood covering his shirt.

There is a crowd of concerned churchgoers gathered around the victim, blocking my view. They are all pleading with him to go to the hospital. I have to fight my way through and then I finally see him. He is a young man in his early twenties with a thrift shop Sunday suit and tie, wearing red Chuck Taylors and a New York Yankees baseball cap. In his hands, he clutches a Bible. He doesn’t appear to be shot at all.

“Show the man! Show the medic! He shot smack dab in the head!” a man says.

I ask the victim to remove his hat so I can examine him. There across his forehead is a band-aid with a small amount of blood stain in the middle. I remove the band-aid. There is no bullet hole there, just a lac.

“You’re not shot,” I say.

“Point Blank he shot me,” the young man says.

“You’re not shot.”

“The Lord and I know what I am and what I am not.”

“Why don’t you tell me happened?”

“Early this morning — around two o clock — I was walking down this very street. A man approached me from behind, grabbed me, took my cell phone and my money, then he had me get down on my knees and he showed me his gun, and I said please don’t shoot me. He said sorry, but he had too — he had orders to shoot me. The man held a gun to my head and pulled the trigger…:

“And…

“And Jesus took the bullet! Praise Be!”

“He may have hit you with the gun, but you are not shot. There isn’t even a powder burn.”

“Don’t tell me what I know. I prayed to Jesus and said, please don’t let him shoot me. Please! It was two o’clock this morning, right outside this church. Please! I prayed. The man pulled the trigger and then Jesus! Praise Be! – took the bullet! It’s a miracle! I’m a living miracle, testament to our savior, testament to this holy place. That’s why I come to this church today.”

“You got to go to the hospital and let them check you,” a woman in a fine Sunday hat says. “You could still have a bullet in your brain. Let them check you.”

“He told the sister here the story this morning so we had to call you.”

“Brother, brother, you gotta go with these paramedics here. They going to take good care of you. We all praying for you, but you gotta be seen.”

“The praying already be done. The Lord protected me and and I’m fine. Jesus already done the checking. They ain’t no bullet in my head anymore. Jesus have that bullet now. Praise Be! This here where I belong right now. This the safe place for me. This is my sanctuary. Praise be! Amen!”

I admit to being at a temporary loss for words.

The cops are here now trying to find out what is going on. I am sure of one thing. No bullet pierced his forehead. I suspect a second thing — he is likely off his meds.

“And Jesus took the bullet!” he tells the officer.

The officer wants to know what the disposition will be. Am I taking him to the hospital or leaving him here?

“He needs to go to the hospital,” I say.

Finally, with enough convincing, and a comment from one of the deacons about how the Lord always be looking out for him, he agrees to go.

The congregation is singing “Jesus Build a Fence.” As we wheel him back out through the main room, he has a beatific smile on his face, clutching his Bible to his chest.

At triage, the hospital registrar wants to know why the patient is here. “I am tempted to say. “GSW to the head” just to watch the consternation. Instead I say “psych.”

I tell the longer narrative to the triage nurse and she just shakes her head. Meanwhile a resident has listened in on the story. He puts on some gloves and walks over to the man and has him take off his hat and then removes the Band-Aid that I had placed back on his wound.

“Lock-down,” the nurse says to me without waiting for a decision from the doctor.

The patient and I had a conversation on the way over to the hospital in the back of the ambulance.

“I am a lucky man,” he said. “Jesus lives on my street.”

“You are a lucky man,” I say.

“Praise Be.”

But I am not thinking about him. I’m thinking back about the poor DJ who took his last breath in that very building – before Jesus signed the lease.

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I worked with one of my old partners last week. Jerry and I used to do the dedicated Hartford car. Jerry is just a few years younger than me, although he doesn’t use Grecian formula like I do so he has had a mane of silver hair for almost as long as I have known him. He is a nice man – always courteous to the patients, no ego of his own, and if he has a complaint, it is a considered one. He is a good solid EMT.

He was only scheduled to work eight hours that morning, but when he saw I didn’t have a partner for my 12-hour gig, he offered to stay four hours later if they would team us together which they did.

I’ve written before that one of the best things about EMS is, provided you have a good partner, the job really is more hanging out than work. Sure, you do calls, but for the most part, you are just out hanging out, shooting the shit, drinking cokes or coffee instead of beers, having some laughs along the way.

We only did one call worth writing about, but it was a good day, and I hope we’ll get to work together again soon. There is some talk about rebidding the shifts, and if it ever worked out that we could be regular partners doing 3 – 12s together that would be awesome.

The one call we did that I am going to write about was for a woman with a swollen foot. We pulled into the address and Jerry said, “I’m getting a bad feeling about this. I think this might be a bariatric call.”

Now it was around four in the afternoon and the city was going nuts. There were no other cars available and our bariatric truck – a specially designed car with a wide power stretcher capable of handling the biggest patients — was already out on a call.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” I said.

At least there was a ramp up to the porch, but that also seemed to suggest that maybe Jerry was right. We walked in the door and there she was, sitting in her extra-large wheelchair.

There is always that moment on a call when you are walking into a house – and when I walk into a house, I am always thinking about how I am going to get a patient out even before I see them – when you realize this is going to be a lift. You are going to have to work for this one. This was the case.

Now just a few days before, working with another partner, we had opened an apartment door to see quite a large man sitting in his extra-large wheel chair, and while we were able to get him to stand and pivot onto our stretcher, we still had to get the stretcher from the low position to the high position. He was big, and worse, he was retaining water, and people who are retaining water are always heavier than they look. Back in the suburbs, we had stretchers with the power lift buttons so for the last three years, instead of getting in my dead lift stance and proving my strength, I just pushed a button or my partner pushed a button while I did the magician’s levitate command, slowly moving my hand up into the air in time with the stretcher. Shazam! No more. I bent my knees, got a good grip on the rail at the stretcher’s head and then on go, tried to drive my legs up, but the stretcher wasn’t going up. My partner offered to switch sides, but vain as always, I said, give me a second and we’ll try again. This time I stretched before hand, and then let out a Gold’s Gym grunt as I drove my legs up. But again, the stretcher wasn’t going up and this time, I started to feel the start of a tear in my pectoral muscles, so I said uncle, and we stopped. We switched sides and got a bystander to help with the head end and only then got the patient up all the way. The man said he was 370. He may have been more. I know in the past my partners and I have done 400 pounders without assistance. Still, it made me think about getting back into the gym, not just to swim, bike and run, which is what I have been doing, but to lift steel. Pump those muscles up to beat back Father Time.

So anyway, back to Jerry and me, and our extra-large lady. Jerry, who I said, does not share my ego, was already on his cell phone to dispatch asking for an assist, only to be told, it would be awhile.

“Please,” the woman said, “You don’t need to call for help. I know I look big, but you two big strong man – I ain’t that big – I lost twenty pounds this month. I don’t need that fat bus no more. You can do it, I know you can. Look at those muscles you got. Please, I know I’m big, but I’m losing weight. You don’t need that fat bus or that big stretcher for me.”

I looked at Jerry, and he looked at me. This was no medical emergency. The woman’s foot had been swollen for a week. We could sit there for an hour and wait for a lift assist, or…

“One try,” I said.

Jerry shook his head – not to say no, but to acknowledge he understood I didn’t want to be beat by this.

“Okay,” he said.

We did some stretches first. “Excuse us,” I told the woman. “We’re on the old side here and need a little prelift warmup.”

“You not old, you two fine young men in your prime, big and strong, but you go on warm up, just so you don’t have to call the fat bus for me.”

So we stretched and limbered up and loosened, and then we took our positions. Knees bent. One two three.

“I knew you strong!” she exclaimed delighted as we lifted her up. “I told you I lost that weight. I don’t need no special stretcher for me.”

“Light as a ballerina!” I said.

The patient and I slapped a high five.

Jerry just laughed to himself, and shook his head.

“We don’t need no lift assist,” I said.

“That’s right!” she said. “You two fine strong men.”

“We’re not too old,” I said to Jerry later.

Again, he just shook his head.

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They wrote everyone up for not doing the new ambulance maintenance checklist. A couple weeks ago, they started handing out the checklist. Lights, motor oil, mileage, cleanliness, tire pressure. Scratches, dents. You name it, it is on there. I did it the first couple days and then stopped doing it because they stopped passing it around and it seemed like no one else was doing it.

But the write up caught my attention. I had no problem signing my bad. I could have argued for the specifics – what day and shift did I not turn one in, but the point was I hadn’t paid much attention to it, and the company was now saying it is important enough that we will write you and everyone else up. So I’m doing the automotive checklist now – or if not me, my partner is doing it.

I think as a rule, we are resistant to change in routine. I can think of a number of changes over the years that we fought against, but now are routine. They instituted a policy back several years ago about coming to a complete stop at all intersections. Most of us thought that was stupid. It’s common practice now. Makes sense, too. I’ll all for safety and safe driving. Backing up your partner. Stupid, we thought. People do it now. Locking the ambulance when you leave it unattended. Becoming more common now. Using not just two stretcher straps, and not just three straps, but three straps with a shoulder harness. Seems like everyone does it. Again safety.

Signatures on paperwork. Many years ago, they used to hardly ever enforce it. That’s key, you don’t enforce something, you are telling me it is not important, and I may be less likely to comply if I am not in full agreement with it. I do remember one time they did enforce the signature rule, but it was an odd one. I was working with my old partner Arthur and they kicked back a run form to us for not getting the patient signature. It had been a cardiac arrest. Faced with the blank signature, Arthur took out his pen and wrote “PATIENT DEAD” in big letters. “That ought to take care of it,” he said.

Now with the electronic PCRs, you can’t advance the chart unless you get a signature, but there is a place to write Patient unable to sign due to (fill in reason). And you can write PATIENT DEAD there if you want.

The older I get the easier it becomes to just do what they want you to do. I’m happy to have a job and the company’s checks have always been good at the bank. And besides, as much as I may not like changes to my routine, there is usually a good reason behind it.

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