The Baby Under the Bench Seat
Disclaimer: This is the first time I’ve written the story out so certain details may have been mis-remembered, but the essence is true.
Back around 1974 when I got my first paid ambulance job (EMT), with a private company, the contract included hauling dead bodies when funeral home hearses were not available. The company was a “livery service”. It was also a medical supply company whose stores were located in each town’s satellite ambulance quarters. Yes, we were shopkeepers as well, selling commodes, kidney basins and trusses!
This took place in a two bedroom cottage, in a sleepy beachside retirement town on the Florida coast. I lived there with two partners. We were responsible for 24 hr. a day 7 days a week coverage of our assigned area along the Intracoastal Waterway. That meant two of us worked five 24 hr. shifts a week and the third only four. As it stood, one of us would ONLY work the four day shift, so I did the five-day shift for a good year; all for $600 a month! (This may account for my absence of sympathetic tears for your suffering today!)
One of our most important functions was to deliver “H” tanks of oxygen (“H” if I remember right; the BIG ones like inboard on the rig) to aged emphysemics in our primarily retired, rural town of 10,000. We knew every one of them; their lives depended on us, and yes, you guessed it; we delivered these tanks while on duty, using our Dodge low-top ambulances!
The scenario would often be that the aged sufferers would lose track of their flow levels, use up their O2 tanks real fast and they’d find themselves gasping on the phone to the company for immediate delivery. Any time of the day or night, we could be called out to “save” them. It was truly pitiful work to see people who could barely breathe sit stationary in front of their T.V.s, sneaking in cigarettes in between gasps for months at a time; opened rotting cans of God knows what scattered on the floor around them.
One morning we had one delivery on schedule and a second last minute emergency. We strapped one tank on the gurney and one on the bench seat. On the way to our first desperate customer we got a call for an “infant in distress”. Pulling off the side of the road where the weeds were high (Yes, we had gone through this routine before!) we jettisoned the tanks and sped off to the emergency.
We were led in to an unusually posh house for the area by a 30 year-old woman who was clearly stunned. In a huge bedroom, in a little antique crib was an infant, lying face down. Examination showed the baby was obviously dead; blue and with morbid lividity. We stayed with the parents, doing the best we could to calm them, called their Doctor, who called the Coroner who called the funeral home to transport (no Coroner’s cars available to that part of the rural county) who then called our Dispatcher to assign us the transport to the hospital where the Coroner would examine the baby.
We carefully wrapped the baby up, placed her on the gurney and headed for the hospital. On the way, we got a call from Dispatch saying the emphysema patient called back in deep distress. We had almost forgotten! We diverted to where we had stashed the tanks, grabbed one (the other could wait!) and hauled butt to the house. Just as we were finished replacing the used tank and carrying the old one to the rig – just barely getting to the poor old guy in time before he gumped out! -- the unit’s radio went off for a vehicle accident five minutes away. There was no one closer than a 25 minute response. We laid down the tank alongside the man’s driveway and took off.
When we got to the scene and I, the “patient man” went to the side door of the rig to take out the trauma box, there I saw the baby on the gurney! I jumped in, grabbed a blanket, wrapped the baby up carefully and then lifted the bench seat up and placed the baby securely in the compartment on another blanket and closed the door and then ran to the scene.
Of course, the MVA was major. We treated and hauled three seriously injured people, brought them to the hospital, then immediately transferred one of them to the Neuro unit in Daytona Beach, 30 miles away. Then, on the way back, we got diverted to no less than two other emergency calls. The last thing we did was go to the old guy’s house, pick up the earlier discarded “H” cylinder, and deliver it to an even older Lady, now at wit’s end!
And there we were, exhausted at about 7 p.m. back in the two bedroom house that was our headquarters and the neighborhood medical supply store when the phone call came in; it was the Owner of the livery service I worked for…
“What the living **** did you guys do with that Baby!!!”
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