It was a quiet shift so far, and the partners continued bantering, solving the problems of the world, gossiping.
“What about those missing meds and supplies?” Dana asked. “I’ll bet they try to pin it on EMTs.” She was thinking of an ongoing problem with inventory—pills, drugs, needles—disappearing from local hospitals and convalescent homes.
Tanisha popped a large potato chip into her mouth and smacked her lips. “Yeah, well, you’d think they’d be going after the big guys instead of trying to track thimblefuls of medicine.” She gave Dana a playful punch. “Wish we had a little thimble full of grass now, don’t you?”
It was five-forty-five, near the end of the shift, when the call came.
A little action, finally. “225 responding,” Dana said.
“Priority 2 out of Golden going to trauma. A GSW vic.” It was the Valley Med radio voice telling them to transport a gunshot-wound victim from Golden State Hospital, off I-580, to the city trauma center in Berkeley.
Dana and Tanisha straightened up and buckled their seat belts. Dana started the engine. “225 en route,” she said into the radio.
Golden State Hospital was only about a mile and a half away. Dana eased the ambulance out of the lot, down a divided road, and onto the I-580 freeway. She headed west, not the rush direction, though there was less and less difference these days as the Bay Area added one housing development after another. Dana weaved in and out, able to do seventy without her lights and siren.
They exited the freeway. Two rights, a left, and they arrived at the hospital.
“225 on scene,” Dana said into her radio.
Dana and Tanisha moved their patient—dark skinned, maybe Indian, Dana thought—onto Valley Med’s heavy-duty yellow gurney. No extra backboard for this guy, no scooper. Patient positioning standard. The patient had already been treated in Golden’s ER; he’d been bandaged, but he needed the more appropriate facilities of Berkeley’s trauma center.
“It never fails,” Tanisha said, shaking her head. “People who drive themselves to the hospital always pick the wrong one.”
“Right,” Dana said. “They should know they’re going to end up in an ambulance one way or another, so why don’t they just call us to begin with?”
Tanisha took her place in the back on the gray vinyl seat across from the gurney and flipped through the paperwork from the ER. The patient had his IV drip and seemed comfortable.
Dana walked quickly to the front of the ambulance and stepped up into the driver’s seat.
A normal call, Code 2.
They were on their way. So far, so good. Dana liked the rush, the feeling she got sitting up there high above even the SUVs. She was in uniform; she was in charge. So what if some jerks were still crazy enough to cut her off now and then? She’d loved the time she drove full throttle over the center divide on the freeway, flicking on the earsplitting sirens, going the wrong way for a quarter mile or so, and then jumping back on, past the stop-and-go traffic.
But this evening’s patient was conscious enough to maybe be freaked out by a big fuss—he was a little looped from the morphine—so Dana decided to stay Code 2, no lights, no siren.
This time she took city streets, winding her way north and slightly east, crossing the line from Oakland into Berkeley, headed for Ashby Avenue. She knew Berkeley; she knew how to avoid the annoying streets that were blocked by makeshift rotaries, designed to slow traffic down. The array of bulky concrete slabs in the middle of the intersections reminded her of a cemetery.
Dana skirted a guy wearing a woolen cap that looked a lot like a yarmulke but was probably just another Berkeley fashion statement: I can wear wool in June if it makes me happy. No wonder suburbanites called it “Bezerkley.”
Time for the ring-down. Dana steadied the ambulance with her left hand, held the radio with her right.
“City, this is Valley Med 225. I have a Code 2. Forty-plus-year-old male, BP 106 over 56, pulse 100, resp rate 24.” The numbers Tanisha had yelled out. “ETA five to ten minutes. How do you copy?”
“Copy clear.” The trauma center dispatcher, at the ready.
Seven minutes later—good timing, in spite of too many arrogant bicyclists thinking they were more important than any motor vehicle, even an ambulance—Dana pulled into the wide semicircular driveway.
Dana walked to the back of the ambulance, where Tanisha had the doors open. They unlocked the gurney and pulled it out. They wheeled it over the rough asphalt, into the trauma center.
One, two, three. Dana and Tanisha moved the patient, supported by the sheets from Golden State Hospital, from the gurney to the trauma center bed. They handed over the paperwork and left Golden State’s sheets behind.