What First Responders Want You To Know About Covid-19 (I Think)
By: Emily Kingsley
Tags: Culture, Health, Society, Covid 19, Relationships

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

I’m not a first responder, but I’m married to one. In a way, that makes me a first responder to a first responder. While he responds to your emergencies, I’m the one who is waiting at home to help him celebrate the good calls, process the bad calls, and keep everything in perspective so he can go to work again the next day.

My husband is the type of paramedic that you really hope shows up when your dad has a heart attack or your toddler wakes up covered in hives.

He is patient, confident, and always has warm hands. He is funny — but not too funny — and can get people to talk about things like what kind of drugs they’ve taken or where the bruises on their chest came from. He is meticulous about medications and can convince even the most crotchety old folks to go to the hospital when their blood pressure is too high.

It sounds cliche, but it takes a special kind of person to be a first responder. I’m not sure if it’s emotional fortitude or fortress-like boundaries, but when Jared comes home from a shift, he scoops up our kids, plays with our dog, kisses me, and pitches in to mow the lawn or cook dinner. Later, over a glass of wine, I’ll learn that his day included a teenage suicide, a couple of heroin overdoses, and a car accident.

For him, a good call is one where his team performs their jobs perfectly. It’s one where the ambulance was stocked with exactly the right equipment and the patient and their family were treated with dignity and respect. Even if a patient dies, he can come home feeling good as long as everything went smoothly.

On the flip side, there are times when things don’t go well on the ambulance. It tips him sideways to not have the right equipment to properly treat a patient. Whenever I borrow his laptop, I find tabs open to pages about pediatric strapping systems, bariatric stretchers, positive non-rebreather tubes, and other pieces of equipment that I know nothing about.

I think he is so focused on makings sure the ambulances in the town where he works are well-stocked because even though he’s a first responder, his ambulance is often the last stop for patients who breathe their last breath under his care. He doesn’t want someone to die because of some obscure 2$ valve that wasn’t available.

You’re lucky if you don’t know this, but until Covid-19, the thing that kept the ambulance wheels rolling was heroin. All day, all night, it was heroin. The overdoses happened fast and frequently. Old, young, rich, poor, dressed, or naked.

We used to talk about heroin all the time. I’m a high school teacher and I would go to school and beg my students to never try it. When we drive through the down where Jared works, he’ll point out all the places he’s gone to treat heroin overdoses. Homes, of course. But parking lots, public parks, Walmart, and Motels.

Once a delivery driver delivered a pizza to a nursing home and overdosed in the bathroom. He left the sink on and was discovered by an old man who saw water running down the hallway.

It’s strange, but I find myself looking back at those heroin years with a little bit of nostalgia. Here’s why: Narcan, the drug that reverses heroin overdoses, is amazing. When paramedics show up, they give a squirt up the nose, and within minutes, a patient who had been blue and pulseless would be standing — and often, trying to run away. So even though the overdose calls were sad to hear about, they often had happy endings.

Heroin wasn’t contagious, and although people from every walk of life can become addicted to it, you can’t spread addiction through aerosolized droplets.

Is it strange to say that now that Covid-19 is on the scene, I miss the overdose calls?

For first responders, not knowing what to do and not having the right equipment to do it is stressful. They thrive on algorithms and dosage charts. One step follows another and the lungs inflate or the heart starts beating again.

Early in the pandemic, Jared told me about treating a patient who later tested positive for Covid. She was laying on her back in bed, her features gaunt and shapeless. Her body contorted as her muscles contracted and she coughed, a perfect, aerosol spray of particles at a precise interval. He put a mask on her and took her to the hospital, not knowing if she would live or die.

Since then, he’s treated many more Covid patients. Some are conspiracy theorists, who deny the pandemic is real as they are gasping for breath on the stretcher. There are parents who caught it from their kids and vice versa. Last week, he transported a couple in their 80s to the hospital who caught it from their son at Thanksgiving dinner.

There is no Narcan for Covid. There’s not even a way to diagnose Covid in the field. Anyone with a cough, a fever, a headache, or stomach pain is treated as if they’re positive, which means all of the first responders on the call have to put on a Halloween costume’s worth of protective equipment. There are no smiles or jokes to lighten the mood. Each call ends with an hour of disinfecting the ambulance, showering, scrubbing, and anxiously waiting to hear the result of the patient’s covid test.

On the outside, Covid has taken a toll on my husband. His voice is hoarse from shouting to be heard through his mask. His hands are dry and cracked from using so much hand sanitizer. His face is rashy from spending so many hours wearing a mask.

On the inside, it’s taken a toll too. Being a paramedic used to mean saving the day. It was heroic and brave and even fun to show up on a scene with flashing lights, a fancy outfit, and a commanding presence that brought order to chaos.

But nobody feels like a hero in a gown and goofy goggles. And it doesn’t feel good to know that every call is a potential covid exposure that could send your life tumbling like a house of cards in the wind. It’s scary to think that microscopic particles from a patient who doesn’t even seem that sick could hitch a ride in your lungs and later kill your dad or your wife — me.

There’s a guy in our neighborhood who is very outspoken about how the pandemic is fake, Covid is imaginary, and the CDC is faking the death toll to put Democrats in power. He doesn’t let his family wear masks and he brags about the fights he gets into when people ask him to put on one.

Yesterday, Jared wondered out loud how our neighbor would handle some of his recent Covid calls. Would he flip the bird and shout ‘conspiracy’ as he strutted the halls of the long term care facility where 14 out of 15 patients have died from Covid? Would he step maskless into the apartment where a Covid patient had waited to call 911 until his sheets were drenched with body fluids? How deeply would he breathe?

As I type this, there are doses of the vaccine headed our way. I know they are a drop in the bucket, but I’m grateful anyway. It’s been hard to know what to hope for over the last few months. But now, I hope the vaccine will be safely and fairly distributed. I hope people will wear masks. I hope my husband can make it a few more months without catching Covid.

I hope you can too.

And if you want to do something nice for first responders, you can skip the baked goods or the handmade cards. Instead, wear a mask. Wash your hands. Nutpunch anyone who tells you Covid is fake. Stay home. See your family over Zoom, order takeout, and spend time outdoors away from crowds.

Oh, and also — don’t do heroin either.