Well, let's just start at the beginning of my career...
I trained in the Bay Area, and for reasons of love of my wife, started employment as a medic in Los Angeles County. I worked my first shift all alone, with an EMT partner, out of a station in Montebello, CA. It was a long 24 hour BLS shift that just happened to have the unusual advantage of a Paramedic(me!) on the bus. Usually that car was a fire car with just EMTs aboard. The 24 hours were almost up, and it had been an otherwise easy shift..... up until first light, just 30 minutes before our scheduled end of shift. To say, "All hell broke loose" was a gross understatement.
The phone rang, and it was our dispatcher telling us there was sketchy details, but to respond for a "TC"(what they call an MVA down there) in Pico Rivera. We took in the song of the birds in the morning before we drowned it out with a siren.
As we approached the scene on Washington Blvd, we instantly knew something wasn't right. There were what I counted as approximately 25 LA Sheriff cars surrounding a house on the other side of the grass curb separated frontage road. We couldn't get anywhere close to the house, so we parked in traffic on the main Blvd, killing the #3 lane. We were first on scene, and LA County Fire was in the distance approaching. This is where the sh*t hit the fan. There I noticed a cop car screeching away down Washington Blvd.(more on that later)
My first patients were two small children on the hood of patrol car, currently getting CPR performed by deputies. I walked up to them and told the deputies to stop.... They were dead. Both tiny bodies were cherry red, not breathing, had no carotid pulses, and had fixed/open mouths and arms were contracted as if they were hugging a non-existent doll. No time to mourn, this show's opening act was just starting.
I looked toward a house, and a deputy was coming out of the house holding another child. He dropped the child at my feet and stated, "There's more, I'll be back." His face was red, and snot was dripping out of his mouth and nose. I could tell he hadn't taken in any oxygen in over a minute. I was becoming clear that we were dealing with carbon monoxide. No time to think too deeply about it. I looked at my feet at the child, 3-4 years old....... Dead.......another one. WTF happened here? I've pronounced three kids dead in 30 seconds!
Fire arrived, and SCBA's were secured and activated. The deputy came out of the house, this time with an adult male. He was breathing, very shallow however. I went to work on him with a firefighter. His jaw was clenched and we were unable to intubate, but he accepted manual ventilation easy enough. We prepped him for transport. Wait, "Are there anymore?" I asked myself. At that moment, a firefighter came out of the house with another child. This one was breathing as well, thank God. Another ambulance arrived on scene. One patient for each rig. We are doing good now. The Captain came out and shouted, "House is clear, GO!"
Now the company I worked for had a full stop policy for all controlled intersections while driving code 3. This was ignored for this ride. Not due to any recklessness mind you, but that the Sheriff's Department had every intersection locked down between the scene and Whittier Presbyterian Hospital. What should have been a 10 minute code 3 ride, took 3-4 minutes at 70mph in a 40mph zone!(my EMT now works for US Border Patrol, good luck writing him up!)
When we walked in to the ER, I was greeted with something I've never seen before, or since.... A whole ER's worth of staff, male and female, crying. As we pushed the gurney inside, I asked a nurse what happened. He pointed to the code room. I saw a small child's arm poking out from the side of a bed, covered head to toe in a white sheet. Another dead kid this morning??? Remember the patrol car screeching away when I arrived on scene? There was a deputy driving, and a deputy in the back doing CPR at 100+ mph.... They couldn't wait for us.
I gave a report on my adult patient's condition to the teary eyed staff of doctors and nurses, and they went to work. He was paralyzed and intubated, and was doing fine shortly after. I was tired and emotionally drained to a greater severity than Marine Corps Boot Camp ever affected me. Since being ripped from sleep less than an hour earlier, the tally was: 4 dead kids, 1 critical adult male, and 1 kid that was breathing when I last saw him before he was taken to another hospital. FML and I just wanna go home and drink beer way too early in the morning. I grabbed my clipboard and my partner Joe and I went to leave.
As we walked toward the door, a very high ranking Deputy Sheriff walked in. He had a few stars on his collar, and the grey hair to match his rank. He had what had to be the most serious look on his face that I had seen in my life. He stopped at Joe and me, and asked, "Where is he?" Joe held up his arm with finger pointed out and said, "curtain 2, there." The deputy turned, walked to the curtain with his handcuffs out, threw the curtain open and stated in a calm tone, "Get out, get out now." There was a brief protest by the doctor, but words were quietly uttered by the high ranking deputy that I was unable to make out from the distance, and medical personnel stepped aside. Handcuffs were applied to the unconscious and chemically paralyzed patient. Joe waited for the dust to settle, and asked him what that was all about. He was told, "We found a suicide note. This was a murder-suicide meant to stick it to his ex-wife. Now go home, son."
The other surviving child never regained neurological function. The father survived and is serving a life sentence.
Welcome to paramedicine!
