ninemarrow Thread

We responded to a ‘sick call’ at about 4 a.m. Dispatch said he was a hospice patient with a history of cancer who had not eaten for a couple of days and had pulled out his medication port. We get there and it’s this poor guy in his early 40′s who is bald from chemo and sitting on his brother’s couch. His skin was blotchy, pale and purple, and he was hyperventilating and diaphoretic. His sis-in-law said he had been pacing from the bed to the couch all night, clearly agitated.

We went out to get the stretcher, and when we came back in he had crapped himself. He just kept saying, ‘Oh… ooooh. No. No. Oooh’ and looking around the room, flinching every now and then like he was waving away flies. We got him to sit on the stretcher, and he said, ‘No, not now!’ We assured him and rolled him out. The medic I was with asked me to get DNR papers, because, ‘He’s doing it right now.’

I walked up to his bro and sis-in law, got the papers, and returned just in time to see him cry a couple of big tears, sob a little, and then crumple. I had to tell his brother he had passed (not easy to see a man drop to his knees in a driveway and wail). Then I got in and prepared to drive to the ER. Im not a real religious guy but every time someone passes in a call i get to thinking if they'll go to a better place. So as I wondered if the man would go to heaven or somewhere I got a bad feeling, like darkness was creeping all around us. I happened to look down at the volt-meter and I saw the number 666 flashing. This panel normally doesn’t flash at all, it just reads voltage. It went 666, then .1, then 666 then .1, then 666 then .1 and then it went back up to 1200 or so and stayed that way. The uneasy feeling went away, but I still prayed the whole way to the hospital. I felt sick as hell all that day, and had a violent vomiting spell later on.