It is supposed to be a happy time of year, this time of December. We are supposed to be thinking about what to get for our family members, in terms of gifts, what kind of meal we will have, wondering where we are going to go to spend the day, or how to make other people's lives just a little bit brighter.
We aren't supposed to be thinking about illness or accidents; yet, unfortunately, death or sickness doesn't take time off, even on a holiday like Christmas. Some of our most heartbreaking cases have occurred around, near, or on Christmas Day, and it's put a damper on our celebrations.
Case in point, last year, when we responded to a call involving a little baby boy who was named Jerrett*.
We were sitting around the fire station, trying to scare up something to do, when the emergency tones went off. Instinctively, we got our gear, jumped into our rig (ambulance), and took off for the location where this particular call came from.
It was for a child, an infant, who was not responsive. The worst kind of call we can possibly have. Any call that involves a person who's stopped breathing is bad enough; when it is a child or a baby, the situation is just made all the worse, all the more tense.
We got to the residence within moments. It was in an affluent part of Nashville. The woman who'd called for the ambulance found her four-month-old son, Jerrett Daniel, lying in his crib, blue and not responsive when she tried to shake him awake. She got scared; naturally, she called for us.
We immediately set to work in trying to revive the little baby. We laid the child on the ground, face up; I started breathing into his mouth and nose while my partner, Wendell Gilmarten, started to rapidly push on his chest, to try to will the little heart back into beating. CPR. The most effective way to get needed oxygen into the brain, or a nonworking pair of lungs or heart, before brain damage sets in.
While Wendell and I tended to the little boy, the other EMT who was with us, Lorene Tate, led the stricken woman out of the room, so she wouldn't have to see us working on her son, and tried to get the needed information from her, and to try to reassure her, telling her that we were doing all we could for the child, and that things would be okay.
We picked up the kid and ran, full tilt, to the waiting ambulance; we soon took off, speeding to the hospital, lights and sirens blaring. The kid was still asystole: without pulse, without blood pressure, without respiration. We knew we had to get to the hospital, pronto, if the kid was to have any chance of making it.
At the hospital, the kid was taken to a resuscitatioin table, where more advance life support was begun. IV lines, wires, tubes, monitors were quickly attached to the boy, where we soon got his latest vital signs. Not good, according to the readings: the kid was clearly on his way to checking out.
We tried, oh, Lord, how we tried! We tried to revive him, but without any success. A doctor pronounced little Jerrett Daniel dead less than twenty minutes later.
I will never forget the anguished cries of the mother when the doctors told her about her baby dying. All of a sudden, we weren't feeling the Christmas spirit. If anything, we felt like yesterday's eggnog, or worse, the Grinch. We were feeling anything but jolly and merry.
The colored lights, the resplendent Christmas tree in the lobby, and the decorations of Santa, snowmen, and bells seemed like a hard, cold slap in the face to me. It made me angry because a child died, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, we could have possibly done to prevent it from happening.
We have had several bad calls around Christmas time, but this was probably one of the worst, besides finding my neighbor Mrs. Caine, dead, or the time when an eight-year-old girl celebrating her birthday stroked out. In fact, this particular incident still makes me sad one year later.
People aren't supposed to get sick or die on Christmas; it goes against everything that we were taught. If anything, it seems cruel, heartless; this is when I wish there wasn't a holiday like Christmas because then maybe things of this magnitude would make a little more sense to me.
~Written by George "Goose" Guzman, Paramedic/EMT, on December 4, 2008.
*Not child's real name. Names have been changed to protect the family involved.
