Probie XII
“Gentlemen!”, I ask Zach and Cpt. Brandon, “do you think at my advanced age it is too late to go to med school?”. Zach and the Captain look momentarily perplexed, as if I am seriously contemplating a career change. I explain, “because those helmets are cooler than ours”. They smile. “Go for it”, they reply.
A cold winter night a short drive from the LZ (landing zone). Our EMTs are doing heroic work inside the house trying to bring a man back to life, while me and Zach are shoveling snow faster than snowblowers, creating turn-around zones along a long one-lane driveway, so we can spin the ambulances around and move the patient quickly to the med flight copter awaiting on the road a mile away. Docs run the show when patients are hanging on the edge of life. All we do is everything we can to get the patient to the hospital as fast as possible. There tends to be a fair bit of improvising.
The Docs get shuttled to the house from the copter in Utility 34 and go inside to help. Firefighter helmets are cool (and heavy) but medical flight helmets are a whole nother category. Think the helmets in Top Gun are sweet? Those, but combined with medic crosses. Literally, angels arriving from the heavens, to save your life. You want to be the coolest dude / dudette at an emergency scene? Stay in school, load up on AP Biology, and get a gig flying around saving people.
The UW Health Med Flight choppers are extra awesome. They’re red, black and white and, when you are laying there on the stretcher wondering if you are going to make it, the first thing you see is Bucky Badger, painted on the copter’s belly, coming to save you. Who’s your messiah now? A flying cartoon Taxidea taxus. It is quite the apparition.
Midday LZ at the Village Hall parking lot. Pager tones and memo in progress immediately ends. Speed* to the station, gear up and jump in Engine 33, only to return to Village Hall. A woman, pulseless and non-breathing is being jolted back to sentience just south of the Poynette fire district border, and our good friends at Arlington Fire need help securing a landing zone.
Bucky descends from the east. Docs arrive in a blast of wind and parking lot grit that I’ll be cleaning out of my ears for days. They jump in the ambulance and work the patient while I have the (somewhat skeptical, to be honest) assignment of Rapid Helicopter Failure Intervention Force. The hose in the bumper spool of Engine 33 has been pulled, so I can instantly go to work if the copter catches fire. Dalton is next to me, assigned to flake (spread) the hose, should my assignment stop being theoretical in nature.
There’s two jet engines howling and hundreds of pounds of blades spinning around and I’m questioning how Sikorsky made it out of the insane asylum to get one of these things off the ground way back when. Questioning only to myself, because Cpt. Brandon has given me an assignment. Whirling blades of death be damned, I’m ready to do it. Well … with Dalton.
Dalton is the only other remaining Probie. Eighteen or nineteen. Without (I’m guessing) any AP Biology. But with the same cool helmet fetish that explains most everything about how simple men truly are. So, Dalton is heading off to the Marine Corps, to be a firefighter. All 130 pounds of him.
The Docs do their magic, the woman gets stretchered into the helo, and the whirling blades of death become whirling blades of life.
See you, Bucky. Godspeed.
* 4/11 edit - "Promptly and responsibly drive"
