With some trepidation...

From Gary Harris:

It was with some great trepidation and reservations that I finally donned the gas mask. I wanted to solve the problem without having to resort to artificial breathing, playing the role of the real man, but when the smell overwhelmed me before even opening the door, I relented and donned the mask.

It fits snugly over mouth and nose and filters with charcoal and some other chemical filtrations, not what you need for chemical warfare, but satisfactory for the job at hand.

Looking back, it was all my fault, and I blamed no one but myself for having to wear the mask to right the wrong, but it was still a bitter, stinking pill of foul bile I had to swallow.

At last, with one great intake of air, I opened the door.

The sights that befell my eyes were unimaginable, things that were once wholesome and pure now distented and putrid beyond belief. The wave of nauseating fumes engulfed me, I could feel the fetid air coating my arms, my hair, my clothes, everything. Even through the mask, I could smell some of the putrid air that was now surrounding my body and pooling at my feet.

On the floor was a pool of what I think was once blood. It was now mixed with milk, mold, and substances no longer recognisable to me. It was thick, coagulated liquid, purplish here, and reddish there, and brown in many spots.

I opened the bottom door and found more sights, that were much worse than what the upper level held. My long dead torture victim was rotted and bloated, his eyes totally gone, melted looking in the sockets. I pulled the stake from his gut, and the skin splits and opens, showing me the writhing mass of maggots underneath, wriggling like the scenes of hell where the people are in the pools of lava, struggling and pulling one against the other, yet none breaking free from the pull.

The maggots squirmed in the cadaver's bloated stomach, trying desperately to hide from the light.

I reluctantly pull the gloves over my hands and get down to business.

I scoop out the maggots, watching them wriggle on my outstretched palm for a moment, before plunging them into the large plastic bag on the floor. I hold the body over the back and shake the maggots out into the bag, along with the remains of his intestines, and one leg that just falls off and disappears along with the rest into the bag. I then throw the body in the sack and continue with my work.

I grab a sponge and plunge my hand into the decayed, molding, rotting puddle of blood and other fluids, I wipe the fluids into a bucket, wipe after wipe of green/grey/purple/brown/red gelling liquid goes into the bucket, mixed in are small dead things, that were feeding on the puddle till the fumes and the rotted, putrid air overwhelmed them and added their dead bodies into the putrid puddle.

Many carcasses splash into the bucket along with several gallons of the offal. Some float on top, some sink to the bottom, never to be seen again.

After the puddle is mostly gone, I approach the other large plastic bags containing the remaining body parts, mainly legs, and a few arms and some torsos and trunks, all rotted, most maggot covered.

They were in plastic bags, but I open the bags anyway to look at the contents. I plunge my gloved hands in and scoop out some maggots, I have never seen so many maggots, of all sizes.

The gas mask is doing beautifully, I get a faint odor of the fetid air that swirls around me, but nothing I can't handle. At this point, the unthinkable happens, I yawn.

It is 4:00 am and I am tired, but the job had to be done, but dammit, why did I have to yawn, and why now?

The elastic holding my mask on stretches with the yawn, and the seal around my mouth and nose is broken and the hot air in the mask is replaced with the foul, putrid odors that were before just a glimmer.

The glimmer is replaced by a swift kick in the gut, a hammer to the head, and a punch to the temple, I stumble, I grab for something, anything to keep me from falling, but to no avail, I go down, thrown off-balance by the putrid air filling my lungs. I smash the mask down tight onto my face and breath rapidly for a moment to clear it out, and my sight returns and the bile retreats from my throat.

I slowly pick myself up, gelling liquid clinging to my pantlegs and my ass is covered in the awful fluid, thickly coating my backside.

I wipe what I can off into the sack, and continue my job.

When it was all over, I had 4 large plastic sacks full of liquid and semi liquid fluid, along with many small cadavers and innumerable body parts, all rotted beyond recognition, maggots were all over the floor, and I had to mop the place about 6 times to get the last of it up.

But as I said, it was my own fault. I cut the refrigerator off 5 weeks earlier, and then we moved out. You really can't blame my dad making me return to clean the damned refrigerator out.

OBT_WAH!!!!!!!!! THe damn fridge was broke anyway, even after I cleaned it inside and out. The reason I cut if off anyway was that it was iced-over and not cooling anymore... Shit...

OBRedneck: we put it on the roadside, me and my wife chuckled watching these two rednecks load it into a truck and drive off with it.

And you thought refrigerator were only for keeping your beer cold. But they can be large reservoirs for tasteless encounters...

Gary Harris

"Why, Gary, you are a man of many talents! How comforting to learn you've expanded your horizons from raping your disabled relatives to murine sadism". Todd Buckingham to me

(Originally posted on Wed, 13 Sep 1995)

Kangaroos & Grenades

From Waz from Oz:

One of the most disgusting sights I have ever seen was a kangaroo that had been shot by a 40mm M-79 grenade launcher firing frag. It was on Singleton Army range in NSW Australia. Now, the range there is perfect 'roo country: flat, gently rolling, with plentiful water and grass all year round. This means that the Eastern Grey Kangaroo is also overrunning the place. They are regularly shot, bombed, triggering old mines and UXO (unexploded ordnance) by jumping on it. They also have the annoying habit of putting themselves directly between the muzzle of your rifle and whatever it is you're shooting at.

Anyway, one day, I'm at the M-79 range. The '79, or wombat gun, is a bulky rifle looking thing- like a single barrelled shotgun, only more so. People are running in and out of the firing bays, between the 'thork' of the thing firing and the metallic 'whang' of the explosions. Then comes the call: "Cease fire- detail, action."

Which basically meant to return the weapon to its loaded and cocked state though with the safety on. The reason soon got back to us: 'Roos on the range!

After about a minute, the 'roos were happily chowing downand showed no signs of wanting to move. The OIC (officer in charge) decideed to do something definitive. "Detail, instant." The firer shouldered his weapon and flicked off the safety.

"Detail, at the 'roos directly to your front: Fire!"

There was a few seconds of silence.

"Detail, fire on those fucking 'roos!"

More silence.

"That's an order!"

"Firing nowww... grenade!" yelled the firer.

There was a hollow 'thonk' sound as the round went off. I counted: 1, 2... a bit before two, there was a high pitched boom. The range must have been about 150 feet.

"Detail- unload."

We were all called out of the waiting bay. The officer told us this was a golden chance to see the actual effects of a 40 mil frag. We all trooped out to see the 'roo.

It was quite dead. It's mates could be seen bounding away at a great rate of knots, and no fucking wonder. The thing had been blown in half. It wasn't like a sheet shrapnel job though. The grenade had apparently caught the roo right in the pocket (not that it had one anymore). The reflexive twitching was quite inpressive, and shattered veins still pulsed feebly, drooling blood out onto the ground. The 'roo's upper arms and ribcage were missing, presumed very fucked up. What was left of its now finely-minced internal organs was steaming gently in the cool morning air as it oozed and slopped its way out of the burst-open abdomen.

The hydrostatic shock of the blast had knocked both its eyes out. They too were missing. Judging by the rest of the mess, they probably flew all the way to Helsinki. Much of the flesh had been stripped away from the bone,and the bones that were left showed signs of extensive pitting from the shrap. The liquid and semiliquid remains were scattered away from the point of impact in a rough cone. There was not a single inch of whole skin left on the body. The hide was tattered, as if it had been slashed with a razor. A couple of the city kid soldiers were 'calling for Hughie', adding a rich cheesy vomit note to the burst open viscera smell already polluting the air. There is absolutely no smell like that 'bust-a-gut' odour: if you've ever gutted an animal, you'll know what it's like.

I looked for a joey, but there wasn't one (or maybe there was: what's one more kilo of mince going to look like?) Finally, a fine bloody froth sat like red bubblebath over the entire putrid fucking mess.When we attempted to move the 'collateral damage' victim, the corpse just fell apart, being structurally unable to support its own drag factor. So we just sort of shuffled it around, stomping it down so it didn't look quite so conspicuous. It didn't work, though, and it took me about a week to carve the purulent rotting roo guts out of the welting in my boots. The skull we had to jump on until it cracked and we could flatten it. I being the heaviest member of the platoon, the job was given to me. I ended up pulping it with a rock... I didn't realise how tough 'roo skulls could be.

Anyway, the 'roo was dead and we got back to firing the 79. There were no other incidents like that again that day, although 'roos started dropping dead from infections caused by the shrap wounds and probably liberally laced with their former friend's skin, guts and (probably) baby joey. I was able to trade extra food for not retelling the story that night.

Hope that was tasteless enough.

Waz (can't wait to see what it'd do to a pregnant woman)

(Originally posted on 10 Sep 1995)

Ben Wa vs Ben Gay?

From: swan

MY fave set of Ben Wa balls was not originally designed as such.

Remember those delightful Health Balls that were popular during the Reagan Regime? Yeah, the big jingly ones!

Take a couple pairs of those suckers. Heat i pair gently to a warm (not fatally hot... unless yer INTO that) temperature... keep other pair in freezer for a while for a REAL chill!

Suspend victim in good Knee-Chest or Lithotomy position Trendelenberg is too restful...you want their ATTENTION!). Take chilled ben wa ball and insert into anus. VictH^H^H^H patient should notice this little operation. When he starts complaining about the "ice cube in his guts" you then alternate with HOT ben wa ball! With alternating hot and cold balls, the patient should begin a lively Watusi! this, of course, sets off the jingling!

Dipping the ben wa balls in tabasco or Ben Gay adds LOVELY grace notes to the performance! When the patient complains of the temperatures of the inserted balls, you merely advise him to wait till everything goes back to normal temperatures. He awaits this change only to discover the sauce you have prepared for him taking its effect!

Be SURE to do this little trick at HIS domicile! You see, shitting OUT the little balls is great fun, but DOES tend to crack porcelain! I once had a victim "fire" a Chinese Health Ball hard enough to lodge in a plaster wall!

If you have a good strong magnet, you can REALLY influence things!

Swan!

Always leave your subjects begging for more...morphine!

(Originally posted on 12 Sep 1995)

Resource for 'tard spotters

From: KatmanDu

A good source of information for 'tard spotters new to a particular area is, believe it or not, the local constabulary. Granted, many of them may be 'tards themselves, but as they are generally very knowledgeable of the locations of local 'tard farms and 'tard hangouts, bribing one or two with doughnuts and/or the promise of a good bit of fun at someone else's expense can gain one some memorable 'tard spotting fishing holes.

I have the excruciating misfortune to work for a campus police department (a fresh heap of roadkill to the first to guess which one based on .sig file addresses), and one area that we routinely patrol is the Georgia Retardation Center, recently renamed to "River's Crossing" to make it a less obvious target for 'tard tormentors. Normally the twitchy little bastards are locked up inside, but on one occassion they were milling about in the parking lot when a squad car rode through. (I wasn't present in said vehicle, but was regaled with the tale later at the station after a good round of doughnut-fucking.) The car was being driven by a hapless trainee who hadn't ever seen the 'tards up close and also occupied by a corporal who should have known better. Said pair parked the car in the back of the lot for a little report-writing training, and the vehicle was soon surrounded by drooling 'tards; unbeknownst to the two officers who were engrossed in their paperwork. The trainee looked up and exclaimed "Gaaaah!" Half the 'tards broke and ran for the building at this, but the rest clung to the squad, screaming "Nyaaggghh!" which the corporal took to mean that they wanted to hear the siren. He activated the light bar and siren, which caused most of the remaining 'tards to soil themselves and begin crying. The 'tard shepherds noticed what was going on at this point and started collecting their charges, while yelling at the officers to turn off the siren. The poor trainee was so flustered that he drove off without turning off the lights. A couple of the hardier 'tards chased the squad out of the parking lot, which frightened the trainee who drove faster, which just seemed to egg the 'tards on. He had the sense to stop and let the 'tard shepherd gather those up before he actually got onto the highway again with them in tow. Pity, really.

I bet that with a little tinkering, those strobe bars could be made to flash at 3f/s... Imagine an entire wing of epileptic 'tards (twitchtards?) gazing out at a phalanx of squad cars, all with their seizure-inducing strobes on... hallways filled with fish-tailing, shit-streaming, urine-soaked twitchtards....

(Originally posted on 20 Sep 1995)

Nastiest shitter you've ever seen?

From: KatmanDu

Warning: It's a long one (she whispered softly)

A little introduction to the neighborhood is in order:

At the beginning of this summer, seeking cheap rent and a landlord who doesn't mind two 60+ pound mildly incontinent canines soiling his cheap carpet, I moved into a recently renovated house mere blocks from downtown. The landlord was snapping up as many decrepit old firetraps as he could, renovating them hastily, and renting them out at exorbitant rates to frat-boy college students turned stoners. The only problem with this scheme was that the houses he was buying were in the middle of Zone 8, one of the nastier maggot-infested, 80-pound hooker crawling, crack-head ridden sections of town; and Muffy the gapeing cunt bowhead would zip off in horror at spotting the likes of Larry the Lump (further explanation of this individual at a later date), leaving the landlord stuck with an unrentable, but perfectly servicable, house. Enter my roommates and I... employees of the police department, owners of large, nasty dogs, prone to violent projectile vomiting at passers-by. For an incredibly discounted rent and no mention whatsoever of a pet deposit (boy, will he regret that!), we get the house so long as we promise to do our best to scare off the local vermin.

On the left side of the house is an abandoned building. We've yet to pry open the doors and look around, but judging from the smell that wafts our way from time to time, such an exploration could be fruitful. On the right side is a crack house... the occupants of which can usually be found shlurping as many 22-oz malt liquors as they can procure or standing on the street corner shouting "I gotcha! I gotcha!" at everything that drives by; making the occassional sale. Across the street is a whorehouse; whose occupants seem to spend their time throwing bottles at the crack house, or wandering out on the corner trying to hawk their scrawny disease infested twats. The rest of the area is just as juicy; there's even a pool hall up the street called (named in a no doubt since unrepeated burst of inspiration) "Tight Pockets". The inhabitants of the area will no doubt provide me with many tasteless anecdotes in the future.

Anywho... The whorehouse got bought out by my landlord last month! Woe is me, I cried; where will I go for a $10 piece of triple-bagger ass on the weekends? I'll have to walk up the street... The landlord served 'em with their eviction papers and away they went. I wandered over the next day to check the house out. First bit of effluvia I noticed was a very full trashcan next to the back door. It's a Georgia summer; about 110 degrees with the heat index, and the odor from this yard had been competing with the stench from the abandoned house and the piles of dogshit in the front yard. My sensitive nose followed the stink trail to the can and I gingerly peered inside... Yum, a sort of brownish-yellow unidentifiable lump crawling with maggots. I wondered briefly if it was one solid can full of brown-yellow pudding, or differentiated in layers, but quailed at the thought of digging through the goop... I know, I know, what sort of chickenshit yellow-bellied asswipe am I turn down such an opportunity, but I was tending a particularly large and sensative whitehead on my forearm, and I didn't want to risk rupturing it before it got really turgid...

The front door was wide open, so I let myself in. I have to hand it to the hookers, they know how to trash a house. Every square inch of floor, except for little walkways down the hall, was covered three feet deep in trash. Old pampers, clothes, bedsheets, soiled mattresses, broken electronics, ruptured bags of household trash, beer bottles... roaches ranging from centimeter size to the whopping 3 inch palmetto bugs were scurrying over the mounds, hundreds of them.. occassionally a wharf rat would poke his snout out of the clutter and then scurry off.

The further back in the house I went, the stronger a familiar odor became... at first I ignored it, figuring it was the detritus at my feet. But it grew stronger and stronger, until I faced an unopened door just off the kitchen (whose entire floor had caved in). Seconds before I pushed upen the door with a trembling hand, I realized what the stench was; and then the door was open and it hit me like a fetid wave full in the face. Waterlogged grogans and old liquishit. You know, the stench you can only get when the toilet quits and the piss and turds stay in the water for a couple of days, or some sick fuck shits in the toilet tank and it decomposes in there. This was the stink, and it was almost a physical, palpable presence in the room.

The toilet was amazing. The bowl was completely, absolutely brimming with tarry black liquishit. It has run down the sides and pooled around the toilet in a four foot shitslick, punctuated here and there by a slimy turd torpedo. My eyes were tearing from the incredible stench and the sheer magnificence of what I was seeing. Never in my years of bar bathroom beershit-filled thunderjugs have I seen such a specimen of diarrhetic excellence. Was this the product of one person, one sitting? How could his bowels hold so much watery feces? Or, more likely, had the occupants had a group squat the night before they were ejected? If so, was it possible that ALL of them suffered from the squirts? (side note: does smoking crack give you the serious runs? Hmm... make a note to grab some crackheads off the corner and squeeze 'em 'til they shit; measure results... something to do over the weekend.)

Alas, the odor proved too much for me (I was also tired of shaking my feet every few minutes to keep the roaches out of my pants legs) and I retreated to the (relatively) fresh air, the image of a monumental lake of liquishit indelibly burned into my brain. It was cleaned out the following day by a no doubt so-desperate-for-cash-they'd-touch-anything crew of cleaners. But it will remain in my mind as the head by which all others will be judged...

(Originally posted on 27 Sep 1995)

Tae 21 - A final post ... maybe

Tae wrote:

A slow, humid Friday night - or so I thought.

Hanging out near a strip of long-closed malls, my partner and I are talking a mile-o-minute - the result of many Coffee Connection mocha frappuchinos, cigarettes, and some Ritalin we confiscated from the previous night's suicide attempt. The silly shit took most of his 'scrip - ignoring the more effective, but less thought-of bottle of Prestone anti-freeze sitting in his garage.

"Why are you doing this to me - 'cause I tried to kill myself?", the guy wails, as we struggle to cuff him to the stretcher's hand-rails.

"No, we're doing this because you're too stupid to correctly kill yourself, and you got _us_ involved." I snarl as I finally get the handcuff on him. Ahh... Each ratcheting 'click' is music to my ears as I make the cuff tighter and tighter.

"So, what do take the Ritalin for?" my partner asks, as he searches for a suitable vein in the patient's forearm to start an IV.

"I have dyslexia and ADD - attention deficit disorder - you know what it means, asshole?" sniffs the patient.

"Yeah - it means you suck at Scrabble."

_That_ got us a howl of anger - and a few lame-ass yanks at his cuffed hands.

But I digress...

I was feeling pretty on-edge with all the Ritalin I took. The last cigarette I had tasted real bad, and I dry-heaved a little. Prime.

"Medic 1 - respond with Ambulance 3... Mass Turnpike - westbound, near exit thirteen ... for a roll-over. Called in by the State Police."

"Medic 1 has it," I answer.

Yee-haw ... a call.

As we pull out of the parking lot and onto the highway, I noticed how unusually _sharp_ everything looks. Great stuff, the 'ol vitamin 'R'.

"So, whaddya think - bullshit?"

"Nah, lookit - it's three in the morning on Saturday, it's foggy, and it was called in by the Staties. It's prolly legit."

We rapidly approach the on-ramp toll booth to the Pike.

The toll-booth guys hate us - 'cause we scream through the gates, honking the air horn impatiently if they take too long to raise the gate-arm, and with all of our emergency lights and strobes, we look like nothing less than a fucking UFO come to bring 'em back Elvis and whisk away their children to conduct experiments - bless their pointy heads.

The toll-collector du jour literally sees us coming from a mile away, and raises the gate-arm well in advance. It should be smooth sailing...

"Hey - watch this," my partner yells.

He steers as if to enter the toll-booth with the raised arm, but at the last moment, veers into another one - coming to a complete stop. Siren still wailing, he calmly takes the ticket the dispenser spits out, and waits for the arm to rise completely before proceeding. The toll-collector is livid. We squeal away.

Our laughter is high-pitched - hyena-like, and definitely not normal. Whether it's the Ritalin coursing through our veins or just another indication that we're slowly losing our sanity, it doesn't really matter. We still get paid the same. The overhead street lamps come farther and fewer apart, until eventually the road ahead is dark - the only illumination coming from our headlights and strobes. The flashes of light are brighter than usual due to the strobes bleeding and diffusing into the fog. I dry heave once more.

Eventually I see the flashing lights of other emergency vehicles in the darkness ahead. We slow down, and come to a stop at the first of a string of road flares laid down to shunt traffic to the right-most lane.

My partner and I get out and move to the rear doors of the truck to get our equipment - only to stopped by a trooper.

"You won't need those," he waves at the equipment bags, "there's nothing you can do for them."

Taking in the entire scene - which was difficult to do because of the darkness, I see a car which was rear-ended and off to the left side of the highway, just touching the cement jersey-barrier. Standing next to the car are three college-aged kids - huddled together and looking pretty pale. They're all okay.

The next car - about a hundred feet further down the road, is completely unidentifiable to make or model. Little round pebbles of safety glass surround the car - which is sitting on it's roof. Steam rises from the engine as radiator fluid trickles onto the road - a sizable puddle already formed. A little further down from the car, I see a body.

Partially covered with a blanket, I see it's a woman - late twenties would be my guess, her facial bones so shattered that her nose has been pushed-in and is flush with the rest of her face. Lifting a corner of the blanket, and I see that her abdomen was torn open - internal organs splayed out on the road, and a foot-long loop of intestine sits on her chest. My guess was that when she was ejected from the vehicle, she landed in such a way that her body was snapped in half, opening her abdomen, and forcing her legs to bend up to touch her back. The closest thing I can imagine would be one of those Indian fakirs - able to hook both legs around their necks. Gross.

"There's another body about fifty yards further down," says the trooper, "the driver."

Walking further down, another blanket-covered body. This one - a early-twenties male, is lying on his back. His face is also distorted - a mottled purple and white. His eyes are wide open, with an expression of total surprise. I can see brain-matter coming from his ears, mouth, and nose, with a still-widening, still-steaming pool of dark blood surrounding his head.

"So, just what exactly happened here?" I ask the trooper.

"Well, as far as I can tell, that first car - the one with the three kids, was traveling pretty slow. The other car must've flew up behind them and rear-ended them. Then it rolled-over a whole buncha times, and the woman was thrown from the car. And then the driver - that guy, crawled out of his car -"

"Wait a minute - the driver didn't die on impact?"

"No, he survived the crash and was standing over his friend, when this _other_ car came flying up the highway, ran over the already dead woman, and hit him. At least that's the story I got from the kids."

Jeezus.

"So, where's the third car?"

"About another hundred yards from the guy's body. The driver's okay, but pretty shook-up."

Seeing as how there was nothing for us to do, we started to walk back to our truck. As we walked past the woman's body, I noticed a line of glistening slickness from the woman's body traveling up the highway about ten yards - body fat.

It was definitely one of the most gruesome scenes I'd been to. I needed to have a smoke - something to heighten the already freaky scene. I reached into my pack - empty. Shit.

As I passed by the college kids, still huddled near the jersey-barrier, I asked them if they had any cigarettes. Looking confused, they answered 'no'. Shit.

Just as I was getting into my truck, I heard some yelling. I turned around to see the cops yelling and waving their flashlights at a pickup truck. The driver was a tad confused as to which way the flares were directing him, and was beginning to drive across the flares - heading towards the woman's body.

He stopped in time.

- Tae

ObT: A couple of days later, I read an article in the newspaper about the accident. It seems that a free-lance photographer had driven by the accident, and took pictures of the scene. Of the fifty or so pictures he took, he only sold two to the papers - the others being too graphic in nature to print.

A couple of days after that, I read another article in the paper. It seems that the third car in the accident was really the fourth. True, he did run over both bodies - but only after the _third_ car ran over the woman's body and killed the guy.

Wanna take a guess who was driving the third car?

The guy who took the pictures.

He'd struck both people, kept on driving, turned _around_ and came back down the Pike. He stopped, made no mention that he'd hit the two people, and proceeded to take pictures. What balls - and all for a lousy fifty bucks.

I woulda held out for at least a c-note.

(Originally posted on 4 Jul 1996)

Tae 20 - Squirrels in my freezer

Tae wrote:

When I was living in the Alsston/Brighton area of Boston, I had the first floor of a lovely house in a quiet residential area. An attorney had bought the house as an investment, and had re-done *everything* in the house. So, it was quite beautiful, when we first moved in.

My housemates and I would greet the morning with cups of coffee, and high-powered air rifles, sitting on the back porch which overlooked a small, forresty-like clearing surrounded by apartment buildings. Our prey? Squirrels - or as one of my housemates quipped:"They're just tree-rats.." My sentiments indeed.

We lay in wait for the furry creatures, talking about sports, beer, who got to park in the off-street parking lot that week (hotly debated topic), beer, until a squirrel would enter our "kill-zone". Then, soft lead pellets would fly, hopefully to fell one of ferocious tree-rat (you should see them when cornered), but most often only to shatter an apartment window, or two.

When one of the most wily of urban-jungle creatures was shot, we would leave the porch to gather the sometimes still moving animal (which was dispatched with all the speed due to this noble creature), and beleiving that you eat what you kill, would skin and dress them. I tried squirrel once - very gamey, not to mention quite chewy, and we all quickly agreed our future catches would go to feeding our house cat - seeing as how we could no longer afford the manufactured cat-food sold by the running dogs of imperialism.

But even the cat had some semblance of good taste, as it bravely quafed down each morsel that was offered to it - since it had no other food to eat. It also quickly puked up every morsel it quaffed down - which brought upon it the discipline it so richly deserved. Eventually, a large stockpile of squirrel carcasses (neatly wrapped in plastic and tin-foil) grew in our freezer. And eventually, as good things must, we all parted ways. Some to further their education, others to fulfill the requirements of their parole officers. As the last occupant of the house, it was up to me to clean it up, and to leave it *just* the way we had found it when we first rented those many years ago... Sure.

After throwing as many clothes I could into garbage bags, I screwed out of there. Leaving behind *many* holes in the walls, piles of garbage, and half a dozen frozen (and dressed) squirrel carcasses in the freezer, suitable for a party of six, or one cat for a week. I also neglected to inform the power company of our departure, necesitating the shutting-off of our power. The landlord, who lived in the burbs, never came by to check on us (sucker) and rented the house to two women attending a nearby college. They were to move in two months after we departed.

I called several months after I moved out to see if I could get some of my security deposit back (folly). Once the landlord realised who was on the other end of the phone, he started screaming hysterically. Snippets: "the piles of garbage", "hardwood floor", "holes in the walls", "modeling clay on the ceilings", "broken water pipes", "rotting something in the freezer..", "girls wouldn't move in","had to replace refrigerator","thousands of dollars of repairs" I got the impression I was not going to get my deposit back, but that's what deposits are for. After telling him I moved to another state, I hung up. Thinking about this, I realized that the power company had shut-off the power, the carcasses had defrosted, and sat there, in a dark, airless compartment for over two months. I _almost_ cringe thinking what it was like for those two girls to open the freezer after sooo long. Almost.

- Tae

_______________________________________________________________

brontochick followed up:

Tae wrote: "Thinking about this, I realized that the power company had shut-off the power, the carcasses had defrosted, and sat there, in a dark, airless compartment for over two months. I _almost_ cringe thinking what it was like for those two girls to open the freezer after sooo long. Almost."

There's a dead squirrel beside the path to my house-- it dropped down out of the blue one day and is now reposing (and decomposing) happily atop a pile of last year's rotten leaves. As I go by on my way to class every morning, I like to stop and examine its progress towards oblivion. at first it looked pretty much like a normal treerat, but as the days went by I noticed that its eyes had disappeared, leaving gaping, oozing dark red sockets. Now its mouth and under-belly are starting to cave in, leaving interesting contours in the scabrous skin revealed by its rapidly disappearing fur. Anyone hungry?

-bc

ObTasteless: My yeast infection continues to grow apace, although now I have lovely medicine for it. More varieties of funny-smelling cream than you can shake a tampon at, and, even more fun, vegetable-oil based suppositories that I have to put in with this little plunger-thing (one of those doodads that looks so carefully innocuous that you know it has to have some sort of tasteless use. Maybe I should auction it off. Anyone want?). Anyhow, the upshot of all this is zhat every morning, I wake up well nigh adrift in a sea of rancid vegetable oil, curdled cream, and yeast chunks. Makes for a nice wake-me-up, though!


(Originally posted on Wed, 6 Apr 1994)

Tae 19 - Hot, humid, bloody

Tae wrote:

Greetings a.t.'ers - old and new!

My sincerest apologies for not posting for quite some time. But, as luck would have it, I have a few minutes to spare, and have successfully dislocated my wrist enough so that I can wriggle one arm out my straight-jacket and type. Bear with me.

Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

The 'hilliest' city in the United States - sorry San Francisco. You want hills - Fitchburg's got 'em. Another mill town victim of the post-industrial textile decline and the lack of major highway access. How sad.

My tour starts off with the usual diff breathers and heroin overdoses. Not much to 'em, really. The hot, humid summer night, with no breeze to speak of, is usually an indicator of multiple responses for asthmatics, and people with chronic bronchitis and emphysema. We arrive usually to find some variation of the same theme: elderly, overweight - the women wearing faded pink polyester house coats with food stains of various ages; the men wearing undershirts gone grey with concentric circles of dried and re-dried sweat stains radiating from their arm-pits.

You find them sitting in the kitchen or the living room, hunkered over rusty card-tables, using all their chest and _neck_ muscles to draw in a deeper breath. The floor is littered with empty medication inhalers, greasy paper plates, cups, newspapers. Every cup and dish in the place is filled-to-overflowing with cigarette butts. Most of the time, if they have cats, they have _many_ cats. I once started counting the number of cats in a woman's apartment, and stopped at ten. The place was literally _crawling_ with cats. With so many cats, it gets to be kind of a pain to change the litter-box. So the cats shit all over the floor, and a new layer of newspaper gets placed on top of the old. Ever enter an apartment with a floor that's uneven and lumpy - and 'squishes' when you walk over it? Take my advice: don't lift up the edge of the newspaper - you won't have to pay for lunch again. But I digress.

They've usually run out of their medication, or are sucking the last puffs of it from their inhaler like it was goddamn mother's milk. Everyone's sweating like crazy - me and my partner, 'cause our uniform's made of the same shit as Saran Wrap, the firefighters, 'cause they're too fucking stupid to take off their turn-out coats, the patient, 'cause it maximizes their 'digusto quotient' and makes my job that much more *pleasant*.

Tea and crumpets? I think not.

Trying to put cardiac monitor electrodes on wet skin simply doesn't happen. The damn things always seem to slip off at the worst times. Using tincture of benzoin - which makes even wet skin sticky, works some of time. But sometimes the 'trode will come off anyway - with a nice layer of dead, grey, benzoin-coated skin. Next bright idea?

We give up trying to get a decent tracing - it's just not worth it. 'Sides, that abberrant cardiac rhythm we briefly saw was there before we were born. We hope.

Give 'em a little oxygen, start an IV, and administer a nebulized bronchodilator, and they're good to go.

'Needle and 'neb - that's all we do.

The heroin overdoses are pretty much the same: some guy in a back-alley, or in some flop-house, found unconscious with his 'works' in a sloppy pile next to him. Some people get pretty fancy with their 'works' - bent spoon with a lighter taped to the handle, etc, but most people eventually get too fucked-up to care. Your standard 'works' assortment:

- bent spoon
- disposable lighter
- alcohol swab
- insulin syringe

Once I had a guy come up to me and ask me for a 'clean needle' - 'cause his was 'dirty'. Where are we - in fucking Amsterdam? So, I take his tiny, little insulin needle, reach into my equipment bag, and pull out the longest, biggest needle I could find - four inches long and about the thickness of a pencil-lead, and give it to him. Hey, what the fuck - it was sterile. But again, I digress.

It's the same old story: you show up and and there's some guy with pinpoint pupils snoring away. You note the scarred criss-cross of veins on each arm - hardened and dark from the caustic injections and site infections, and count yourself lucky if you find some tiny vein between his thumb and forefinger. You start an IV; and before you 'push' the meds through the IV to reverse the overdose, you give a coupla' mgs of the stuff intramuscularly. Otherwise, if you push the IV meds first, you'll end up wrestling with the guy to give him the shot in the arm - all the while denying he took anything; that he isn't a heroin user; that yeah - sometimes he passes out in back-alleys and pisses himself for no apparent reason - what the fuck's it to 'ya? He denies that that's *his* bent spoon and needle that you're dumping into a bio-hazard box; all the while looking at it longingly as you close the cover. The scarred veins? 'Old accident.' Sure, pal. I've heard it all. Just shut the fuck up.

That was the extent of it for most of the evening. That is, until we got a call for a 'suicide attempt with a knife'.

All the way to the call, my partner and I bitch about the heat, the paperwork that's piling up, the lack of a decent air conditioner, the heat. We arrive just after the fire department. Several police cruisers are parked outside of an apartment complex. We walk towards several cops standing near their cruisers. The sergeant looks over and sees us - he tells us that some guy slashed his own arm and was bleeding heavily.

I turn to the entrance of the apartment building, and notice a large, congealing puddle of blood on the front steps. No patient.

"Sarge - where's the patient?" I ask.

"He's still up in his apartment."

"Did someone notice him walking around outside and call you guys?"

"Nah - he called it in himself - fucking pussy."

"Uh, so if he never left his apartment, why is there a big puddle of blood _outside_?"

The cop just points to the third floor - and I see a man holding his arm outside an apartment window. I look carefully at the puddle on the first floor - every so often drops of blood fall from the man's arm and lands in the puddle. I now see that the outer edges of the blood puddle are darker and congealed; while the center of the puddle is brighter and still liquid. Silly me, what was I thinking?

The walk up three flights of stairs is slow and tiring. At every landing, apartment doors are slightly ajar; with eyes peering out. The smell of paella; the sound of blaring TV sets; crying babies; the occasional screaming-match - all from behind these doors. When I reach the third floor, I am *completely* drenched in sweat. The tight weave of the polyester monkey-suit I wear doesn't permit my sweat to evaporate, so I stew in my own juices. I can actually feel beads of sweat running down my leg - only to be absorbed by my socks. It's too damn hot.

I make my way to the right apartment by following the crackle of portable radios. I enter the apartment - several cops are milling inside, all talking about their pending divorces. I recognize a couple of them, and nod as I make my way past them and into the bedroom where someone is shouting incoherently. My guess is that's the patient.

There's the guy alright - still holding his arm out the window. Still bleeding like crazy. I pause a moment to take in the entire room: cheesy brown carpet littered with long-empty bottles of beer - again filled with cigarette butts and an almost-black liquid slurry of ashes and flat beer. There's an equally impressive-sized puddle of blood in the middle of the carpet. The walls have blood spattered over them in lazy horizontal lines - as if the guy had stood in the center of the room, held his bleeding arm out, and spun around in a circle several times. The most impressive thing was the mirror over the headboard of the bed. A large, rectangular mirror, with the words "My girlfriend's a fucking whore. I hate her," - presumably written by the man by dipping his fingers in his own blood and smearing it on the mirror. Correct spelling and punctuation - I'm impressed.

Finally, I walk over to the man - who's still shouting something about his girlfriend, and tell him to shut the fuck up so I can look at his arm. He thrusts his almost entirely red arm towards me, forcefully enough for several drops of blood to spatter on my shoe, as if he were proud of his achievement. Looking at the wound, I must say _I_ was impressed: a clean, four-inch cut _across_ the bend of his arm. It looked pretty deep, too, as I could clearly see layers of fat and tendon in the wound. From the elbow down, his arm was paler than the rest of him. I felt his hand - cool to the touch. No circulation.

I tried to stauch the flow of blood by taking a large piece of gauze and pressing down _hard_ over the wound. Within seconds the white gauze turned red and was soaked through. Time to get creative. Pulling a blood-pressure cuff from my bag, I first place several more layers of gauze over the wound, then wrapped the cuff over that. I inflated the cuff until the needle of the pressure gauge almost reached the 300 mm Hg mark. It slowed the bleeding a bit - but not by much. Time to go.

"My fucking girlfriend - this'll show her," he told me; his speech slurred with booze and blood-loss.

"Uh - what?" I asked, trying to navigate him from the bedroom into the living room.

"I did this to punish _her_, man. She fucked around on me."

"Okay, I see, you're punishing her, but you're the one that's bleeding. Hmm."

"She'll think twice about doing that to me again, man."

The logic escapes me.

As we passed through the living room, I glanced into kitchen, and saw a stringy-looking woman smoking a cigarette while talking in tired, hushed tones to a cop. As we passed-by, she gave a quick glance to the man, who was still obviously proud of what he'd accomplished. Her eyes showed no concern for him; only a relief that he was finally leaving the apartment.

I led him down the stairs to the waiting ambulance, where my partner had already set up two IV's. We started both of them, and I was working on a third, when we pulled into the hospital ambulance bay. We wheeled him into one of the trauma rooms. A surgeon came in to examine the wound.

After removing the cuff, the layers of gauze were peeled back. It began to bleed freely again - this time a translucent pink flow emerged.

"Shit, this guy has more saline than blood in him. Type and cross a couple of units for him - stat."

I walked out into the humid night, to help my partner restock the ambulance. The back of the ambulance was a mess - bloody gauze, gloves, towels. The floor of the ambulance had zig-zagged line of blood; each change in direction an indicator of a left or right turn. Shit.

"You know what?" my partner asked.

"No, tell me."

"We could really use a working air conditioner back here."

"I hear that."

After calling in-service, we drove to the Dairy Queen to get raspberry-lime rickeys. God, the line was long...

- Tae (Paramedic '90 - Present, Tax Evader '91 - '93, Mr. Alt.Tasteless '94)

(Originally posted on 1 Jul 1995)

Tae 18 - Re: choad

King Christopher wrote: "Ok.. So who wants details on owning your very own "Save the CHOAD!" bumper sticker? Printed in sassy and alluring black and white, with magic sticky stuff on the back, it can be affixed to the forehead of your favorite republican easily and quickly!

Mail me for details, and you too can own an official alt.tasteless bumper sticker!"

Tae wrote:

I highly recommend one. It _used_ to adorn the rear bumper of the paramedic unit I work on ... until someone figured out what it meant.

[cut to scene of: Tae with razor blade, sitting in parking lot, scraping bumper sticker off ...]

How they figured out it was me, I'll never know.

Now I bring a laminated bumper sticker to work with me, and tape it to the rear bumper - and take it off when I leave. Twelve hours of advertisement versus none ...

- Tae

(Originally posted on 19 Mar 1995)

Tae 17 - Been a while

Tae writes:

I barely made it in time for my day shift. That was planned. Seeing as how Monday mornings typically have the highest incident of heart attacks, more often than not my unit would have to respond some time before shift change. I figured that if I showed up early, I'd be blessed with having to respond to a call before my first cup of coffee - painful for me, deadly for the patient. If I showed up barely in time for the shift, not only would I avoid having to work-up some HOH (hard of hearing) Q-tip, but I'd be able to relax in the lounge for while - on company time, of course. The gods smiled upon me: as I entered the garage, I could see that my unit was gone. The dispatcher confirmed that the night crew had responded to a 'chest pain' just a few minutes before I arrived. I was assured at least an hour's worth of paperwork and restocking before they could clear. I punched-in, sat in the employee lounge, and drank my coffee as I sucked off the company tit. Life was good.

However, all good things, like chemically-induced hallucinatory states, must come to an end. About half an hour later, my unit rolled in - a dirty, mud-splattered beast; in its short but hard life, it'd probably transported more drunks and junkies than most homeless shelters had ever seen. The night crew dragged themselves out of the truck, one guy handing me a set of keys and a portable radio as he passed me by. He was too tired to even say 'hello' as walked pass me; maybe he didn't like me. Oh well, fuck him too.

The other person from the night shift, Chris, started gathering stray paperwork and dead LifePak monitor batteries to turn in. She was going to be my day partner. She looked like shit: hair flattened on one side of her head - 'bed head', her shirt was rumpled-looking and sported blood/food/vomitus stains. I don't know what kind of threats and/or promises the supervisor made in order for her to work the night into the day, but every time I've done it, I've regretted it. However, I've worked with her for a few years, and under the Aqua-Net and vomit was one tough, street-smart medic, so I wasn't worried. Once, a drunk guy at a call grabbed her ass, and she kicked him in the balls so hard, the cops on-scene took pity and asked the guy if he was alright, as he lay curled in a fetal position, gasping for air. My guess was ... not.

I began to size up how the shift would be; it was a Monday morning, so I could expect a few more chest pain calls in the next few hours, the roads were dry so the chances of us responding to an MVA (motor vehicle accident) were slim, but the early-morning rush hour traffic always fucked up those odds. My partner du jour had worked a busy overnight shift, so I pretty much expected to be driving the truck the entire shift with a slack-jawed, drooling person sitting next to me. All things considered, it wasn't so bad. Besides, I'd just downed a double-latte, and things began to take on that hard-edged, metallic sheen that always happens to me when I take too many uppers at one time. I was 'rarin to go.

As we drove to the parking lot behind a Dunkin' Donuts - our 'satellite' spot for the day, I asked Chris how her night was.

"mumble mumble stabbing mumble mumble mumble O.D. mumble tough tube mumble puke mumble ..."

It was probably the best response I would get from her, as she'd already put on her sunglasses and was leaning back in the seat, hoping to catch a nap before we got to the parking lot.

I pulled into the parking lot, and postitioned the truck near a dumpster behind the store - away from the public view. I settled down to read the newspaper, while Chris crawled in back to lay down on the stretcher.

The morning passed amiably enough - a couple of calls that we were cancelled on during our response. We went to the police station cellblock to check on a prisoner who claimed that he was having a heart attack. I was sceptical at first, since the guy was only twenty some-odd years old, his heart rhythm looked normal, and typically guys try to get out of jail by complaining of some medical problem. But he was giving me all the right answers ... until I asked him whether his teeth hurt. This one always gets 'em. They figure - what the hell, if my chest hurts, why not my teeth? As soon as he started on how much his actual teeth - not his jaw (which is a valid symptom of cardiac chest pain) were killing him, I realized the boy was trying to get a few hours out of the cell. I then zoomed in for the clincher: with a wink to the desk sergeant standing behind me, I turned to the man and with a dead-serious face, asked him if his _ears_ hurt too, adding that "it was very important that I know this".

He paused for a moment, then bit:

"Yeah, now that you mention it, my _ears_ hurt too - a burning sensation! Am I gonna be okay?"

Bingo.

Without another word, I ripped the cardiac monitor wires from his chest, the adhesive foam sensors taking a few hairs with them. I gathered my equipment, and left the cellblock, the sergeant looking none too pleased with the guy. I hurried up the stairs - so I couldn't be called upon as a witness to an act of police brutality. When I got back to the truck, I opened the side-door and tossed the equipment back in. Chris was still on the stretcher - dead to the world. She looked kinda cute while she was sleeping. I had this urge to climb in back with her. But my place was in front. Reluctantly, I got behind the steering wheel, called 'available' on the radio, and drove back to the parking lot.

About an hour later, we received a call for a 'possible dead body.' I woke up Chris as I zig-zagged in and out of traffic. I hated to do this, but if the body turned out to be not quite dead (sorry Victor) we'd both have to work on the guy. We arrived in front an apartment complex, several police cruisers already parked on the curb. I grabbed the airway bag and monitor and Chris told me she'd catch up with me, as she grabbed the drug box and oxygen tank. As I walked down the hallway to the apartment, a dog bounded out of one of the rooms further down, barking madly. I stopped and had my leg halfway back, ready to kick the thing if it felt the urge for some Oriental. It paid no mind to me, as it flew past me and down the hall. It was a cute thing, a brown and white pit-bull pup. Damn thing was going to be huge when it grew up.

As I entered the apartment, a cop approached me, and said "This one's definitely gone." He stepped aside to let me see the body. The body was of a mid-to-late twenties male, jeans, boots, no shirt, laying on his back on the carpetted floor of the apartment. His chest had multiple healed scars - probably from knife-fights. I couldn't make out what nationality he was since his face was gone. At first, I thought, for some bizarre reason, that he was wearing a Halloween mask. Then I realised that it wasn't a mask, but his exposed skull. His entire face was missing, leaving only a toothy, grinning skull. This was a new one for me.

Just then, my partner, Chris, showed up. We stood there exchanging a few what-the-fucks as we stared at the corpse. One of the cops came up to us and asked us what we thought happened to him.

"Well, he couldn't have shot himself - it would've shattered the skull and left splatter-marks on the wall." The cop looked - yep, intact skull and not a drop of blood on the floor or walls.

"And, since there's no blood spill _at all_, whatever happened to him had to have happened _well_ after he died."

The cop pondered this for a moment, and said:

"Well, if someone tried to remove his face to make identifying him hard, then he should've cut off his hands and feet too, so I don't think that's a theory."

As we all stood there and stared at the corpse, the dog ran into the room.

Click.

"Say," Chris quietly asked, "whose dog is that?"

"Uh, he ran out of the apartment - oh fuck."

Chris then dropped the drug box and ran out of the apartment. I grabbed it and followed her out of the apartment. She went straight to the ambulance and opened the side-door and climbed in. I thought she was going back there to puke, but when I reached the ambulance, I found her vigorously rubbing her face with a towel soaked in alcohol.

"Fucking dog. I let the fucking dog lick my face in the hallway. Fucking dog."

She kept rubbing her face with the towel - until her face looked red and raw. I wasn't queesy in the apartment, as the sight of the corpse was too overwhelming for mere nausea. But as I imagined Chris's face being licked by a dog that just _ate_ someone else's, I admit I had a few dry heaves.

The rest of the shift was uneventful. Except every hour or so, we drove up to the hospital so that Chris could wash her face. By the end of the shift her face was blotchy and dry from all the soap and washing. I shoulda kicked the damn dog when I had a chance.

- Tae

(Originally posted on 9 Mar 1995)

Tae 16 - Nothing Tasteless In My Life

Tae wrote:

Julia wrote: "ObClosestICameToTasteless: I was sick last week with this cough/cold thing that has been going around. I was wondering how it is possible for the human body (ie:the sinus cavities) to produce so damn much snot in such a short period of time. I must have blown 10 gallons of snot out within an 8 hour period. How is this possible? Tae?"

Sorry, Julia, but for such mundane - yet, tasteless conditions such as an Upper Respiratory Infection, one must consult a physician ... Sonya?

As far as I can recall, the influenza virus, which causes colds, comes in so many different strains that 1) catching a cold is quite easy, since you cannot possibly produce antibodies for _all_ strains, since mutations occur constantly, 2) When dead antibodies accumulate, they're expelled from the body in the form of mucus.

The copius production of mucus could be attributed to a well-adjusted immune system working overtime. Environmental factors should not be overlooked, as cold, dry air helps in drying the nasal passages, which in turn produce more mucus to coat it's lining.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

>"Wish me well in my quest for tastelessness."

Always.

ObT: Over the weekend, two dead bodies were discovered in the city of Lowell, MA. As my partner and I were driving around the city, looking for the 'ultimate' donut, a '10-53' - 'dead body' call went out over the air. Having nothing better to do, we signed-on and told the dispatcher that we'd go over to 'check things out.' The body was discovered near a local breakfast place, where I swear they serve the most dangerous breakfast sandwiches - grilled hamburger bun topped with a scrambled egg, ham, bacon, and sausage, *plus* home-fries. The 'Three-Meat Boot Mill' sandwich. Deadly. But I digress.

A large crowd had spilled out of the normally filled to capacity restaraunt once the discovery had been made, so my partner took the opportunity to go inside and place an order for both us - only to discover that the cook was outside too, observing the scene. Apparently, the unseasonably warm weather lately melted enough snow off the body for someone to recognise it and call the cops. The body was at the bottom of a recently drained river, some fifty feet below any surface roads, so recovering it proved to be challenge. When the fire department finally got to the body and flipped it over onto it's back, a small gasp and murmurs errupted from the crowd, as all they'd been able to see prior was a vague snow-covered back. Forty-ish year-old male, and by the looks of the way the head lolled to-and-fro as they loaded it onto a Stokes (chicken-wire) basket to haul up, he'd probably broken his neck.

As a winch slowly raised the basket up to the watching crowd, I noticed that both his wrists were fractured - possibly an indication that the man had been conscious as he fell, and tried to 'brace' his fall with his outstretched arms, resulting in the bilateral fractures as he impacted. His face was slightly bloated, and a mottled blue, but the cold environment prevented the formation of gasses in the body, leaving his features relatively intact and bearable to look at.

The murmur rose in volume as the body got closer to the crowd. Several late-comers crossed the yellow-taped 'police-line' to try and get a better look. My partner and I were standing at the edge of the riverbank with a full view of the proceedings - to the envy of the rest of the crowd.

'Hey,' I said to the crowd, half-jokingly, 'you can stand here with us - but it'll cost you a dollar.'

The dollar bills began to wave at me from the front row. Sick fucks.

The other body discovered that day was at the end of a dead-end alley. Again, the warm weather and recent rain storms helped uncover it from it's snowy blanket. Another crew was responded to the call with us, and as we stood there while having a cigarette, waiting for the cops to arrive, one of the newer guys pointed out the 'scratches' on the man's face.

"He must've been in a fight or something," he ventured.

"Nah. You see how regularly shaped the scratches are - almost triangular?"

"Yeah?"

"Those are from rats getting a little snack."

The boy blanched and decided to wait in the truck, while the rest of us remained in the alley. It was a hell of a nice day.

- Tae

(Originally posted on 16 Jan 1995)

Tae 15 - Another day ...

Tae wrote:

My alarm clock has a feature that I specifically bought it for:

One alarm setting will turn on the radio; the volume gradually increases until it's so loud that the speaker distorts the 60's music station that it's set to. I hate 60's music - so does my downstairs neighbor, who has a penchant for rapping his ceiling (my floor) with a broom-stick, as a sign of his displeasure.

Why I am telling you this?

Seven-thirty in the morning. That's thirty minutes past the time I was supposed to be at work. That's about an _hour_ past the time I set my alarm to go off. That's about ten minutes past the time my downstairs neighbor decided he'd had enough, and began to tappity-tap his morse-code of hate to me. Only it wasn't really morse-code; it was more like:

*WHAM* *WHAM* *WHAM* "You fucking asshole!" *WHAM* *WHAM* *WHAM*

It was about that time that I decided to wake up. My head throbbing from last night's drinking binge, I stumbled towards the alarm, shut it off. After a few more taps to the ceiling, my neighbor finished with a loud -"FUCKING ASSHOLE!" There was silence. Then the phone rang. I stumbled to this new source of noise - and pain, and answered:

"Uhh, hullo?"

"Tae, WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?"

It was the dispatcher.

That's how my day began.

I got into work half an hour later. All the ambulances were out doing calls. I walked into the dispatch office. Shift change had taken place long before I woke up; the only person to talk to was Kevin, the dispatcher.

ObAside: Kevin has the dubious honor of making me puke once. Several years ago, he noticed a large lump in the middle of his chest. Convinced that it was nothing more than a large cyst, he asked me to drain it for him, as he was too cheap to go to a doctor. After assembling the appropriate equipment, I made a small incision at the base of the cyst. A thin stream of green pus mixed with blood shot out of the wound, a smell reminiscent of sour milk and rancid seafood rose to my face. The smell was so overpowering that I retched and eventually puked. In my defense, I will say that I recovered enough to finish the procedure; squeezing the cyst to make sure that all of the pus was evacuated from the cyst.

After exchanging a few pleasantries with the dispatcher:

"How's the wife?"

"Hate the lying bitch."

"How're the kids?"

"Goddamn rug-rats - can't stand'em."

"How's that urinary tract infection - still hurt to pee?"

"Fuck you."

My unit - Medic 11, backed into the garage. The guy that'd stayed over for me looked haggard. I quickly walked over to relieve him of his keys and radio.

"What did you go out for?"

"Diff breather - two-hundred and fifty pounds - third-floor carry-down."

"Um, well - thanks for staying for me."

"Fuck you."

Seeing as this would be the tone for the day, I quickly checked the truck out, hoping to leave the base as soon as possible. We went in search of coffee - the fluid-replacement of choice. Just as we were pulling in to the nearest "Dunkin' Donuts," we received our first call of the day:

"Medic 11 - respond priority one for a man 'in pain.'"

"That man better be 'in pain,' or he will be," roared my partner as he backed out of the parking lot. The entire company knew that my partner was on Prozac. It didn't seem to be working. As he ranted during the response, all I could think about was the day-glo orange and pink sign that rapidly shrank from my sight - and with it my only hope for salvation on what was turning out to be a real stinker of a day.

We arrived at the address. Engine 2 was several blocks away, it's air-horn doing double-time, trying to clear the morning traffic. I grabbed the 'medical bag' and oxygen tank, while my partner slung the cardiac monitor over his shoulder. His rants had become subdued - now an occasional mumble. Little snippets of "... just wait..." and "...they'll be sorry..." under his breath added to general misery. We walked up a few steps leading to the front porch, and took positions just left and right of the door. I rapped on the door with my flashlight:

"Hello - anyone call for an ambulance?"

No response.

I turned the door-knob; the front door swung-in smoothly, revealing a set of stairs and a long narrow hallway, which lead to what appeared to a kitchen. Giving my partner, a "what the hell" look, I entered the hallway.

"Hey - anybody call an ambulance?" I shouted, as I tried to decide whether to go down the hall, or proceed up the stairs. My partner was still outside, trying to decide whether to enter at all. Just then, we both heard a muffled voice coming from the end of the hall. We followed the voice to a closed door. Taking our positions on either side of the door again, I knocked:

"Hello - did you call an ambulance?"

"Who's out there? do you want?"

I opened the door, and saw an elderly man, wearing nothing but briefs, standing next to a bed. He was facing away from me.

"Did you call for an ambulance?"

"I don't know."

"Why don't you turn this way and look at me?"

"I can't move, it hurts."

By this time, Engine 2 had arrived, and I could hear the roar of the diesel engine through the open door. Feeling a little more safe, I entered the room, and approached the man. I saw why he couldn't move:

He had been impaled on one of the bedposts. Somehow, this man had a bed post rammed up between his anus and scrotum - while in a standing position. I kneeled in front of this older man, in what could have been misconstrued as a private exchange between priest and penitent, in order to get a better look an the injury. The man was wearing briefs, it's fabric had also been pushed through the skin along with the bedpost. There was a little spotting of blood on the briefs - and the largest 'skid mark' I'd seen in recent times. The underwear were a uniform gray, with spots of dark dried urine. He was wearing them with the maker's label out - a faded "Tuesday" written in permanent marker on the elastic. I asked him what had happened.

"I don't know. I got up, and ... I don't remember."

The tops of the other three bed posts were conical in shape, with a smooth blunt tip at the top. I shudder to think how much force it took to have such a blunt object pierce the skin. My best guess was that the man, in an attempt to get out of bed, actually got _on_ his bed, then slipped off the side of it, impaling himself in a standing position.

That deep question answered, we now had to figure out how to get him off the bedpost. The standard procedure in dealing with impaled objects is to leave it in place, stabilize the object to minimize further injury to the patient, and transport. Obviously there are exceptions to the procedure. I couldn't see myself loading the bed and patient in the back - though in retrospect, it may have been a spectacular way to end my career in EMS.

The fire department offered to cut part of the bedpost off, to minimize the amount of bedpost I'd have to take with me. Another ... interesting option, one that involved a chainsaw. Again, a vision of a spectacular end to my career. No, that wouldn't do.

The man, after standing stock-still for the better part of twenty minutes, was beginning to tire; his legs now visibly shaking. It was quickly decided that we'd place a 'scoop' board behind him, and strap him to the board while he was standing. After securing him to the board, we would lift him off the post.

As we were strapping him to the 'scoop,' the man suddenly said - "You'd better hurry."

"I know you're tired, sir - we'll have you out very soon."

"No, it's not that - I gotta use the bathroom."

I didn't even ask him whether it was a 'number 1 or 2,' I didn't want to know. We silently picked up the pace, working feverishly to strap him to the board. Then we lifted him up and off the bedpost, which he acknowledged with a sudden intake of breath, and a loud moan. We then carried him out of the house and into the waiting ambulance.

There was a slight pause as my partner and I decided who would ride in back with him. My bloodshot eyes met his angry, Prozac-enhanced ones in a silent battle of wills. I hesitated - and lost. I climbed in back, saying a little prayer.

Every bump on the road caused the patient to groan, and me to pray a little harder. A particularly violent bump caused me to look towards the front of the ambulance. I could see sheer, malicious delight in my partner's eyes in the rear-view mirror, as he glanced back every so often to enjoy my misery. The sudden realization - a 'Zen' moment, if you will, that he was _deliberately_ aiming for bumps on the road, filled me with hate even as my newfound respect for him grew. Cunning bastard.

We arrived at the hospital, and backed into the ambulance bay. We tried to carry him into the emergency department as quickly as possible, but as we crossed the threshold of the ER doors, the patient let out a long, wet-sounding flatus, followed by a stream of runny, dark diarrhea. We didn't stop, merely shifting our positions to avoid the spatters of shit that hit the linoleum floor. We're nothing,if not professionals.

The rest of the day sucked. Too.

- Tae

(Originally posted on 11 Sep 1994)

Tae 14 - Re: Boiled to death in Menudo

Tae wrote:

Kevin Oliver wrote: "the copper cauldron while the cook wasn't looking and pulled the cauldron over on to himself. Get Tae to describe something called a "full thickness third degree burn" on the face of a child. Pretty crispy kid. "

Well, as long as someone's asking:

The severity of a burn can be described by degrees:

1st degree - limited to the most superficial layers of the skin, producing redness and pain, as in a scald or moderate sunburn.

2nd degree - penetrates the skin deeper, producing pain and blistering, as well as some subcutaneous swelling. Blister formation may not be apparent until several hours after the injury; before the blisters become visible, the skin may simply be red and mottled. Severe pain is characteristic of these burns because nerve endings are irritated and hypersensitive; the slightest pressure or other stimulation of the burned area causes exquisite pain. Second degree burns are most commonly caused by contact with boiling liquids.

3rd degree - involves damage to or destruction of the full thickness of the skin and can involve underlying muscle, bone (military definition of '4th degree'), and other structures as well. The skin in a third degree burn may appear charred and leathery or may be dry and pale. Pain is usually absent because of destruction of nerve endings. Patients with third-degree burns are prone to lose massive quantities of fluid; since they lack the usual protective mechanism of the skin. Massive infections are not uncommon.

If a person sustains a third-degree burn, there is usually an expanding ring of burns of lesser severity surrounding it.

I know, I know ...

ObTasteless:

Received a call for 'woman with burns.' Arrived at an elderly housing complex, where the fire department was already on-scene, and was hurrying us up the stairs to the woman's apartment. The smell of burning plastic and hair wafted through the hallway as we reached her door. Entered the apartment to find - what else - an elderly woman in some sort of polyester night-gown, sitting in an easy-chair. Apparently, she had been in her bedroom, and had fallen asleep while smoking a cigarette. The cigarette had dropped on her night-gown, which promptly burst into flame. She awoke to find herself on fire, got out of bed, walked to her easy-chair, sat down and dialed the fire department. Her night-gown had melted over her body, leaving large black patches of plastic molded to her skin, which cracked every time she shifted in the chair - much to the consternation of the firefighters. Patches of her hair were singed, the smell of which was overpowering. Initially, the fire department had thought that she'd fallen asleep in the chair, but revised their estimate once someone pointed out the black, melted foot-prints in the carpet leading from the bedroom to the chair, and the bits of melted flesh that trailed the footprints. By the time we lifted her out of the chair to place her on the stretcher, the burning plastic that had melted onto her back had had time to cool and mold itself to the chair. The result was that a large portion of the skin on her back remained with the plastic - on the chair. Her back now looked like oozy, grey leather - if you could picture that.

In the ambulance, I tried to start an IV, which was hard, since both her arms had received burns. I applied a tourniquet to her arm, and tried to clean her forearm with an alcohol swab, only to watch as the entire top layer of her skin roll off - like a glove, with only gentle rubbing.

This gal was fucked.

A helicopter had been requested to airlift her to Boston. Our unit arrived at the LZ, and the flight crew jumped in the back of our ambulance. The flight nurse must have been new, since she took one sniff and started retching.

Of course, the woman died.

> "I may be wrong, but it seems that liquid burns produce a lot more tasteless looking injuries than flames or dry heat/flash fires. "

That's because liquids - especially thick, viscous ones, stick to the patient, allowing more heat transfer and damage to occur than a simple 'flash' burn. Steam injuries of the same temperature are even worse, since there is additional heat transfer from the steam going from a gas phase to a liquid phase - which results in a double-whammy. Not to mention when the airway is involved, such as a car radiator explosion. People usually have a sharp intake of breath when surprised - and take in some superheated steam from the radiator. The swelling of the airway takes place some time later, and their windpipe closes completely, necessitating a tracheotomy - messy.

- Tae

(Originally posted on 10 Nov 1994)

Tae 13 - Catheters (Was: diarrhea & vomiting in zero-g)

"MARK CHRISTOPHER writes: " Interesting contraption they used for pissing during the early space missions. Apparently, it was like a condom... they'd roll this latex covering over their dick, and take a leak into the contraption that'd collect it and probably shoot it off into space."

HinTysen wrote: "These are called "condom catheters." We wore them a month ago for Oktoberfest bar-hopping. They roll onto your dick and stick (with adhesive) to the skin and pubes at the base. The piss goes into a tube down your leg into a bag strapped to your ankle. Except for one of the guys, who taped the end of the tube to his shoe and just hung his leg over the curb, lifted his pant leg and drained the vein."

Tae writes:

Ahh, this brings back memories ...

The condom catheters, aka 'Texas' caths, are used for people with incontinence problems, but for some reason or other, cannot tolerate a catheter in the bladder (usually due to an enlarged prostate).

Two memories come to mind:

Once, when I decided to drive to NYC, I couldn't really be bothered with the notion of pissing during my six-hour drive. So I rolled one of these babies onto my choad, and detached the leg-bag, allowing the tube to hang out from the driver's side door. Anytime I felt the urge, I just let go, the urine flowing down the tube, and out the door.

It was just me, the cath, and a two two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew. And by god we made it.

The second memory that comes to mind happened a couple of years ago. I received a call for a 'man with a problem,' and arrived to find a paraplegic man in bed, who simply called us to re-attach his 'Texas' cath.

He had no use of his legs, and limited use of his arms, so fine motor skills were out of the question. He did, however, have all sorts of things hung around his bed - bottles of Jim Beam with straws, water bottles, bags of chips, and several TV remotes. He was drunk at the time he called us, and after he opened the front door by remote-control, was found in the bedroom, waving a nickel-plated .38.

"My fucking catheter fell off!" he yelled.

"Well, what do you want us to do about it?"

"Fucking put it back on."

"Listen man, I ain't touching your thing unless I have to. We'll take you to the hospital."

Then we thought about the process of extricating this man, driving him to the hospital, then filling out the paperwork for the call, and decided it wasn't worth. We agreed that it was best to replace the catheter there, clear-up as a 'public assist' and go back to bed. There was only one problem. *Who* was going to put the thing on.

As usual, I lost the coin-toss, and several minutes later, I was touching this guy's shrivelled schlong with my double-gloved hands. Trouble was, he wasn't the most hygenic person around, and I had to *clean* the damn thing before I could re-apply the cath. Also there's an _adhesive_ you apply to the penis to make sure that it doesn't get dislodged.

So here I am with this packet of adhesive, this guy's shrivelled dick, which looked more like a Vienna sausage that'd been left out in the sun too long than a penis, and the guy being drunk, giggling as he looked at my obvious disgust.

Sometimes it helps if the penis is, well, a bit ... angry, as it helps when you roll the condom on. That was not an option with this guy. Quite frankly, if it *did* get angry, I'd drop the damn thing and leave.

I finally got the catheter on, with my partner on the sidelines, trying not to laugh, and the guy staring at me, laughing his fucking head off. I made him scrawl a 'refusal for treatment' form and left.

I guess I used too much adhesive, as the next week, my company got another call to his address, this time by the visiting nurse, who was having trouble *removing* the cath. Someone else transported him.

- Tae

(Originally posted on 28 Oct 1994)

Tae 12 - Re: Hello? Is anyone in there?

The Music of The Night wrote: "nonono you moron, if you're going commit suicide, the best way to do it (well if using a knife or sharp object like broken glass) is to slash the throat. The jugular makes pretty patterns when tapped. "

Tae writes:

No. No. No. You _idiot_. If we were discussing ways to commit suicide, then slashing the wrist would be listed under 'ho hum.' But you weren't discussing a botched suicide attempt in your last post - were you? If you were - try again.

ObTasteless:

Got a call for a suicide attempt last week. A man walked out of his house and onto the sidewalk. In one hand he held a fistfull of pennies, in the other - an M80 firecracker.

Before anyone could stop him, he put all the pennies in his mouth, then put the M80 in his mouth, and lit it. The explosion drove the pennies through his soft palate, and into his brain. When we arrived, we found a man supine on the sidewalk, with a big red splotch where his face used to be. There were no remaining landmarks anywhere on his face. Surprisingly, he was still breathing. Whether it was the remaining intact brainstem or that he was just too stupid to know he should've been dead - I'll never know. Since he was still breathing, we had to make a resuscitation attempt.

"Dave - I'll tube him ... I think." I said, as I pulled out the intubation roll.

My equipment was set up - now all I had to do was find the mouth.

"Hey - where did he get an M80 this time of year?" was Dave's reply.

"Uh - you're not gonna try to treat him - are you?" asked one of the cops. I could see the little hamster-wheel turning slowly in his head. "That's really gonna make this crime scene hard to secure - if you move his body."

Translation: I don't want to do any more paperwork than I have to.

"Don't worry," I replied. "Even if we stabilize him - someone will still have to turn him to the sun and water him once a day."

"Huh - what's that supposed to mean?" asked the now bewildered cop.

"It means that he'll be a vegetable all the rest of his days." replied my partner. "Just call him 'Carrot-top' from now on."

"Fitzy - leave the medics alone." yelled one of the detectives. Thank god.

During the conversation, I continued to look for the mouth. By moving one red flap over here ... and this red flap like so - found it!

I snapped the intubation blade in the 'open' position - the light-bulb at the end of it shined a steady white. I placed into the oozy cavity, and was dismayed.

There was no visible structure to follow - no epiglottis, no vocal cords. Nothing.

Just then I saw a bubble form from a puddle of blood. I followed it with my endotracheal tube - to my surprise, frothy blood began to travel up the tube, which eventually stopped. The small bubbles on the side of the tube began to move up and down - just like a respiration. I listened over the chest while Dave attached the other end of the tube to a 'ambu' and began to 'bag' him. I could hear breath sounds on both sides of his chest. I was in. I inflated the cuff at the other end of the tube - to make an air-tight seal between the tube and his bronchus, and quickly secured the tube to his, err, head. After rolling him onto a spine-board, we transported him to a local hospital.

Turn him to the sun and water him once a day.

"the detectives I worked with at the local p.d. called them "splatter patterns" but, come to think of it, they may have been talking about gunshot scenes. "

But you'll never really know - will you? Cause all you do is hear about it.

[lame anatomy lesson deleted]

"You cannot ignore the music of the night...."

I can sure as hell ignore you - lameass fuck.

- Tae

(Originally posted on 7 Oct 1994)

Tae 11 - RE: Aircraft Dismemberments IV

Tim J Emert writes: "Well, we dropped it in a plastic baggie and put it on ice (teacher also cut his finger off once, so knew what to do. Keep it cold and dry. Right, Tae?) and sent him off to the emergency room, who took one look at the mangled chunk of meat in the baggie and threw it in the trash. "

Tae writes:

Absotively correct. You _could_ actually wrap the amputated part in gauze moistened with saline, but let's be serious for a moment: who the hell keeps saline around? Very rarely are amputated parts less than a 1/4 inch in length re-attached. It simply isn't worth the effort. And if the part is mangled or really dirty - forget it.

ObAside: I was once called to a posh home in Wellesley, MA, for a report of an 'amputation.' Upon arrival, I found a fourty-ish year-old women with an ENORMOUS bandage covering her hand. The fire department said that they recovered the amputated part, and had it on ice. I asked to look at the part, and saw the tip of the woman's finger in a plastic bag. Twasn't more than, oh say, 1/8 inch in length.

"Uh ma'am, I hate to say this - but I doubt that they'll be able to re-attach such a small piece back on."

"But they've GOT TO - I'm a concert violinist!"

"Well, we'll take it with us - but no promises."

After getting to the hospital, the surgeon took one look at this 'tip' and said:

"Sorry - can't do anything with this," and promptly dumped the baggie into the trash.

The grief-stricken woman stared straight ahead and said:

"I'll never play the violin again."

Most of the staff made their excuses and left the room - unable to stifle the urge to laugh.

- Tae

(Originally posted on Wed, 3 Aug 1994)

Tae 10 - "Bar code"

Tae writes:

I don't know why I did it. Perhaps I felt an obligation to serve the community. Perhaps it was the fact that I hadn't worked a shift at this company for quite some time. Maybe it was the fact that a supervisor was on the other end of the phone, offering to suck my dick if I worked. Well, in the end, I think my negative cash flow was the big reason I worked a ...

DAY SHIFT!

Anywhere you go, whatever work you do, if you have a choice of what shift to work, never, NEVER work a day shift. Sigh.

Anyway, I showed up in the morning, already on my third cigarette, glugging a large cup of coffee that I'd hoped would replace several hours of sleep I _didn't_ get the previous night. I was raring to go.

Nervously, I eyed the garage. Good. No management-types in sight. I walked briskly towards the crew quarters, hoping the dispatcher wouldn't see me, and try to force me onto a truck before my shift. I was halfway across the garage floor, when the general manager emerged from behind a row of metal lockers. Most of the ambulances were out; I was trapped - with nothing to slink behind. His eyes fixed, then narrowed on me. I started to sweat.

"Tae, how GOOD of you to show up today. It's been ENTIRELY too long since the last time I saw you."

"Why, Mr. Mansfield, good morning." I smiled weakly, "How's the family?"

"Lousy. The wife just smashed up a rental car. My daughter moved in with a hippie." he growled. Damn. Then he noticed my uniform shirt. "That doesn't look like the shirts we issued to you."

"Well, you see - I was called in on short notice, and I didn't have any clean company shirts. Besides, this shirt is much more comfortable, it's a blend of cotton and polyester - see?"

"No, that won't do," shaking his head, "we have a strict uniform code here, you know that, Tae. Normally I'd have to send you home, but you're in luck. I happen to have some spare company shirts right here." Pats the lockers.

He then pulls out a stiff, all-polyester shirt, and hands it to me.

"Here you go - oh, and don't forget to put on your tie ..."

Damn. Damn. Damn.

An hour later, I was in the ambulance, fighting morning traffic to get to my 'satellite' location - a parking lot next to a donut shop. The other paramedic unit had received a call, and we were going to 'sit on the line' between the two cities - so that we could 'cover' both areas. Dispatchers call this 'dynamic system status management.' I call it 'sitting in a parking lot, for hours on end, on one of the hottest days of the summer, with no AC, and no bathroom in sight.' Damn.

My partner, Mellisa, had just passed her medic exam, and was chomping at the bit, waiting to do a call. Myself, I was looking forward to walking to the donut shop, where I would buy the biggest cup of iced coffee I could, drink the entire contents, then urinate into the empty cup. 'Sides, Mel was beginning to get on my nerves. She was one of those 'morning' people, and chattered on about how bright and sunny it was, and how she hoped to do a call, and how she was getting married soon ...

I got out of the truck, and started to walk to the shop. It was either that, or I'd find the nearest large rock, and SMASH, SMASH, SMASH!

ObAside: My former roommate (also a paramedic), and I used to plot ways to kidnap her. We'd convert the spare room in our apartment into a 'dungeon,' walls painted flat black, that 'egg-crate' foam sound-proofing covering the walls - so as not to disturb the neighbors. We'd nail the window shut, and after placing her in the room, seal her off from the rest of the world. The only thing we'd feed her was raw red meat laced with LSD. Occassionally, we'd use a slide projector to show images of violent deaths and eyeballs on the one white square of paint on the opposite wall. Ministry and Skinny Puppy would blare from speakers mounted on the walls, behind metal grates. Eventually, she'd go insane, and we'd be able to put her on a leash and walk her around the neighborhood, while she drooled and made guttural noises. Every so often, we'd have to pull hard on the leash, as not to let her get too close to the neighborhood children.

Er - where was I? Oh yes.

I was about to place my coffee order, when I heard my unit number being called over the portable radio I carried. I heard Mellisa answer - we were being dispatched to a 'man having a seizure.' Didn't get my coffee. Damn.

As we pulled up to the address, we could see the police and fire departments, huddled over a man, who was laying on the sidewalk, IFO (in front of) a neighborhood bar. They seemed to be doing CPR on the man. Since the man was not trying to push the burly firefighter off his chest, we had a pretty good idea that he was indeed in cardiac arrest.

Since Mellisa was newly certified, and needed some experience, I told her that she could intubate, while I would set-up the cardiac monitor, and start the IV.

A crowd had gathered, some of the people in the crowd were friends of the man. Apparently, they had all gone drinking in that very same bar, and when they emerged, the man complained of feeling dizzy, then collapsed. After a few minutes of "Hey Fred, are you okay?" passed with no response, they called the police.

While we worked over him, several of his friends were shouting drunken words of encouragement:

"C'mon *hic* Fred! I know you can make it!"

"Hey Fred, can you hear me? Wake up!"

I attached the monitor to his chest, while Mellisa positioned herself at the patient's head. I did not envy her; several minutes of 'firefighter' CPR had produced a stomach that was obviously distended with air. I turned on the monitor. V-fib. Ventricular fibrillation. Shockable rhythm.

I charged the paddles, and when the whine of the monitor leveled out and I heard a *beep* I yelled "Clear," then shocked the man. His arms jerked upwards, then fell back. I stared at the monitor, waiting for it the EKG tracing to re-center. Asystole. Flatline. One of the man's friends took the electrically-induced arm spasm as a sign of returning life:

"Atta boy, Fred. He's coming back!" Murmur in the crowd ...

Once I had the IV established, I quickly 'pushed' several milligrams of epinephrine (Adrenalin) and atropine into his vein in rapid succession. I told the firefighter to continue compressions, to try and circulate the drugs.

Meanwhile, Mellisa was having a hard time placing the tube. Several times she said she could see the vocal cords, through which she'd try to pass the tube. But every time she visualized the cords, then grabbed the tube to place it, the vocal cords would disappear, frustrating her efforts.

After a few tries, she finally placed the tube.

"There - I think it's in." she said.

She spoke too soon, as vomitus and gastric contents started to pour out of the tube - a sure sign that it'd been placed in the esophagus. The end of the tube had been aiming straight up. A stream of vomitus, propelled by the man's inflated stomach, shot into the air - only to land on his face, chest, and Mellisa. She quickly turned the tube down towards the pavement, and a small stream of pink, cloudy liquid began to creep slowly towards me. I moved aside. Too late. My pants leg cuff darkened with the vomitus it had absorbed.

The sun was directly above us. As I kneeled on the sidewalk, looking at the monitor, I could see the heat waves distorting the air several inches above the street. The smell of vomitus, which I believe had an odor of grain alcohol, in addition to the acrid smell of bile and pizza, began to make me gag a little. Just then the monitor indicated that the patient had a shockable rhythm. I charged the padlles again - this time at a higher energy setting, and shocked him again. His arms flew up again. The monitor stayed flat. Again.

"'Scuse me - do you think he's gonna be awright?" asked a boozy voice just inches from my ear. It was one of his friends.

I don't know. Maybe it was because he startled me, or perhaps it was that fact that I was wearing the equivalent of Saran Wrap, in terms of breath-ability and heat retention, for a shirt, and I was getting heevy from kneeling in some guys regurg, but my response was less than polite:

"Get the fuck away from me."

A cop motioned for him to move away. Mellisa was able to place the tube. I had just finished giving him another round of drugs. The monitor showed a change in rhythm. I checked for a pulse. Surprisingly, there was one. The patient's face began to change color, from a dark mottled blue, to a nice shade of pink - almost red in fact. I wondered about this for moment, then realised his color was partially due to his consumption of alcohol.

His pulse rate began to climb; so did his blood pressure. After rolling him onto a long board, we loaded him into the ambulance. Off we went to the hospital. He's in the ICU at this moment. Physiologically - he's doing pretty good. Neurologically - it's anyone's guess whether Fred's still in there.

Oh well, at least we still get to bill his insurance.

- Tae

The moral of the story: NEVER work a day shift.

(Originally posted on Mon, 25 Jul 1994)

_________________________________________________
David Cockburn asks: "Tae, I'm curious: why not? My MedicalMissus(tm) reckons the nights on duty are far worse, usually due to alcohol/drugs etc. All the worst accidents seem to be then, too."

Tae replies:

Well, David, I agree with your missus: night shift garners much more of the drug-related trauma than day. But that is not the thing that bothers me about working nights. I'd rather work the evening or night shift. You're dealing with a 'trauma junkie' of the highest dependancy. I can't describe how much better I feel about my life when I'm standing over some poor fuck who's noisily puking out his lower intestines.

ObAside: I've been known to say to myself:"Better him than me." A line shamelessly stolen from "Full Metal Jacket," while standing over said fuck.

The reason I warned y'all not to work the day shift is that that's when the highest ratio of managers-to-employees arises. That's when they notice that your boots are scuffed or not polished. Or your tie is loosened in _only_ 96 degree temperatures. Or your billing paperwork isn't up to snuff and the poor, high school educated, big-haired, gum-snappin', 'Vito'-dating, oxygen-wasting office 'girl' just can't seem to make heads or tails of it. So what the poor girl to do? Continue to sit in an air-conditioned office, polish and sand her nails down to the consistency of ice-picks, and dream of the day when she finally hits the 'Megabucks' lottery, so she can get the boob job she's always wanted and finally dump 'Vito' and his Chevy Camaro, for someone with more 'class' - like 'Luigi' - you know, the one the drives the IROC.

Bitter? Me? Noooo.

- Tae

(Originally posted on Fri, 29 Jul 1994)