Ice Job
by by Frank Burchby

Hell of a start to the morning. I’d barely gotten my stuff stashed into a corner of our tiny crew quarters when we were dispatched for a rollover accident on the north side of town.

We had managed to worm our way through to the outskirts of town when I overheard Grand Chute Fire call over the air that the roads were slippery and for responding units to be careful. The cool air the previous evening had brought out some fog, which clung to some roads as a thin sheet of ice. Black ice, they call it, because you can’t see it covering the dark road surface until you’re sliding along on it.

Another report came over the radio, this time from a unit already at the scene stating that there was one patient, trapped beneath his minivan and possibly not breathing. Bad news. I pressed the pedal a little harder, and felt the rear wheels of the ambulance spin a little before they responded to the gas. I felt myself tense up a little more--It’s tough enough to drive an eight-ton rig full of equipment and two people, but add icy roads and a waiting patient in traumatic arrest, and you’ve got a full-blown adrenaline nightmare on your hands.

The accident scene was sounding worse by the minute: The first responders were unable to access the patient at all to start treatment, and were forced to stand and wait while the rescue squad made its way to them with the lifting equipment.

I eased the ambulance around a sharp bend in the road, thankful that the rig stayed solid through the turn. But when I got back on the gas after the turn, I felt the rear wheels wiggle out to the side a bit. I turned the steering wheel a little to correct, and then the wheels slid a little the other way. No steering, no brakes…swell. Momentum was still carrying us forward, but our ambulance was fishtailing like a drunken bum on a slanted sidewalk. Each turn of the wheel turned us farther back and forth, until the weight of the back end was too much to overcome, and we slid completely around and into the ditch, facing back the way we came. As we slid down the embankment, the top-heavy ambulance began to tip sideways with the slant of the ditch, but mud grabbed our wheels and we ground to a halt without flipping on our side.

I grabbed the radio microphone and called dispatch to send a second ambulance to the scene, as well as a wrecker for us. With heroic effort, I managed to keep from swearing out loud until after I got off the radio. I looked to my right, and my partner Sherri was gone, having scrambled out the door the second we stopped. She said she could see the scene about 500 yards up the road. A kind bystander (I never got your name, sir, or a chance to thank you) stopped in his pickup truck to make sure we were o.k. Before he knew what was happening, Sherri was in his passenger seat and asking (telling?) him to drive us down the road to our waiting patient. I threw our gear bags, a longboard, and myself into the pickup bed, and he drove us down to the scene.

We jumped out of the truck, and quickly realized that we weren’t going to be of much help to anyone. The patient was pinned beneath his minivan, which was up to its axles in mud—we couldn’t even reach him, except for one outstretched arm, and it would take at least fifteen minutes to get the van lifted with airbags so we could start to treat him. The ashen color of his skin and the absence of a pulse on his wrist told us that he was already dead, and after the further delay of extrication, he would be far beyond anything we could do to try and bring him back. The efforts to lift the van continued, but the air of futility was everywhere.

Standing nearby, useless until the van was moved, I glanced back at our rig, sitting awkwardly in the ditch far behind us. I knew that there wasn’t much that I could’ve done to keep our ambulance on the road, but I still felt like an idiot. If our patient had been treatable, it would have made matters a million times worse to have no way of transporting him. Stupid. You can’t help people if you end up needing help yourself. We were just lucky that we hadn’t gotten hurt too.

The van was hoisted up, and we pulled the gentleman out from under it. He was obviously long gone, but we gave him a cursory once-over to make absolutely certain. His shirt had a large bloodstain on the front, and I cut through the cloth to find a gaping hole in his chest. His sternum had split right down the middle, with some thread and staples dotting the bone and skin at the outer edges: He had obviously had open heart surgery just a short time ago, and the wound from the procedure had only begun to heal before he had gotten pinned under the van. The crushing impact had split the wound back open, though not enough to expose the underlying heart and lungs.

It was a little depressing…this guy had cheated death once already, buying some extra time here on earth with the help of an expert surgeon, only to have that time ripped away for good by a chance accident. A freak thing, too: Judging by where the tire marks stopped, the van had flipped over only one revolution before landing atop him. But for a simple click of his seat belt, he probably would have made it through the crash with a few minor injuries.

Afterward, while I was standing there taking the heat from my fire department friends about my driving skills, Sherri trudged her way back to the rig to wait for the tow truck. After making sure the coroner was on his way, I gathered our bags and started to head that way too. Seeing me lifting the bulky gear, one of the police officers offered me a ride in his squad car back to the ambulance. I thanked him, tossed the bags in, and flopped down in the back seat, already drained, and still facing 23 more hours of work. Just as we were pulling away, I glimpsed Rob Schipper, one of the firefighters, pulling out a camera and aiming it my way.

To this day, their department has a photo of my ambulance in the ditch, next to another of me, in full paramedic uniform, being driven away in the back seat of a squad car, looking like the angriest, guiltiest felon you’d ever see on Court TV.