The day started out with the usual type of emergency calls: elderly ladies falling, a potential diabetic shock, a construction worker lacerating his shin -- purely routine. Then THE call came in. Our dispatcher announced: "Middle-aged man, unknown."
The word "unknown" will send shivers up any EMT's spine. When responding to an unknown, you might find yourself faced with a kid who has chugged a shitload of Clorox, a psychotic holding a knife to his own throat, or someone who has shoved a lemon up their asshole. (I was on the aforementioned lemon call. The guy said he slipped on it in the shower. Another PoopReport story in the wings -- I promise.)
As my crew and I gathered up our gear and boarded the ambulance, I radioed dispatch again, hoping for a little more information. Our dispatchers are fine folks who do their very best to give us as much pertinent information as possible prior to our arrival on a scene. If they have a patient update, they will give it to us immediately. Unfortunately, all our dispatcher could say was, "Ummahhh... it seems that, well, the police are on scene, and, well, it is 'unknown.' 10-4 over and out."
Roger that, and oh boy. Every cell in my body said this is gonna be a bad one, and my crew agreed. We readied our supplies as we sped to the scene: defibrillator, oxygen, suction, ventilation machine, bandages, splints, traction device, ice, heat, blankets, backboards, neck and spine stabilization collars, glucose, epinephrine, activated charcoal, and even an OB/GYN kit. Who knew what horror lay in wait for us?
As we arrived at the scene, everything appeared normal. It was a modest home with a neat lawn and carefully planted flower boxes. Suburbia at its finest. We passed three police cruisers in the driveway as we made our way into the house, struggling with our heavy gear, loaded down like a Himalayan Sherpas. The first few steps into the house weren't bad -- but then IT hit us. The stench. The smell. The most God-awful malodorous aroma I had ever encountered, and it was making a beeline for my tender pink nostrils, where it ricocheted and pirouetted against my unsuspecting nasal tissues like a drunken ballerina. It was the unmistakable smell of shit. Really bad shit.
In our ambulance corps, we have a name for calls that involve human shit: Code Brown. This call was clearly going to be the mother of all Code Browns.
After gathering our wits for a brief second, we heard wild, animalistic screaming emanating from an upstairs bedroom. Apparently, this is where our patient was. Fortunately someone had had the foresight to grab some biohazard masks from the rig; we donned them before ascending the stairs.
Wearing one of these masks is a pleasure in and of itself, especially if you haven't brushed your teeth for a few hours. You are basically breathing back in your own breath funk, and if you swill coffee, smoke cigarettes, and have a penchant for 7-Eleven breakfast burritos, the buildup behind the mask from your rancid pie hole will literally make your eyes water. Nonetheless, it was a hell of a lot better than the shit-soaked air we were sucking in. We started up the stairs, following the sounds of the screams, and entered into one of the bedrooms, where we found him: a middle-aged man, naked, jumping up and down on his bed, covered from head to toe in his own excrement, screaming like a woman in labor. His hair was caked with shit, his face and torso were entirely slathered in brown, and he had little flecks of feces on his teeth which gave him the appearance of a dentally-challenged individual, when in fact it was shit imitating gaping gum holes. His flaccid penis bounced wildly up and down as bits of turd ricocheted from his withered shaft. His pubic hair resembled a shit afro, his legs had chunks of mottled crap down the length of them, and even the spaces between his toes were covered in his own waste. This guy had painted his whole body in feces -- a sort of a merde Monet. And the smell. Sweet Jesus, the smell was enough to peel marine paint off a steel-hulled tanker.
It was then that we noticed the rest of the room. There were enormous piles of excrement on every visible surface. One would have thought a herd of Clydesdales with Irritable Bowel Syndrome had temporarily taken up residence in this guy's room. Never had we seem so much shit in one place. This guy must have been holding it for days before he let loose. Apparently channeling his inner artist, this man had used his shit to finger-paint the walls, windows, curtains, and doors of his room. There were handprints, footprints, and ass prints all over the place. He had crapped in a coffee cup next to his bed. He had left a pile on the TV stand, on a windowsill, and on his pillow. There were turd piles on the floor, the bed, the clothes hamper, and the closet. It looked as if some fucker from the Ghirardelli chocolate factory had gone apeshit.
It seemed that our patient had begun his crap crusade the night before, and a fecal timeline revealed fresh piles indicating recent dumps and semi-hard mounds which had crisped up as they sat there festering. Jaws agape, we noticed that as our patient was jumping on his bed, he was leaving perfect shit prints of his hands on the ceiling. He began screaming that we wouldn't be able to catch him, and then he jumped off the bed and made a mad dash for the bathroom. We ran after him, where we found him spinning around in circles like a whirling shit dervish, dancing to some inner psychotic song that none of us could thankfully hear.
Despite this incredibly heinous sight, I have to admit that for a crazy fucker, he was rather graceful, daintily arching one shit-covered foot like a prima ballerina and twirling his crap-crusted body from one side of the bathroom to the other.
It was then that it hit us: how the hell are we going to get this guy out of here and into the ambulance? The police officers had by now exited the room and were guffawing out in the hallway at the carnage we faced. Clearly they were not getting involved.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. The only solution we could come up with was to throw a sheet over him and trap him like a rare rainforest butterfly.
The problem was, there wasn't a clean sheet to be found. All had been the victim of his fecal fury, and all were fully loaded. I went back into the bedroom, where I found a sheet that had been largely spared and was only crusty on the corners. It was better than nothing. I tentatively picked it up and brought it to the bathroom. By now, MC Crapper had thrown himself into the bathtub and was singing I'm A Little Teapot at the top of his lungs. There was only one opportunity to catch this slippery brown fox, and this was it.
We threw the sheet over him as he lay screeching in the tub and tucked it under him. Like a bird whose cage is covered for the night with a cloth, this seemed to calm him down, and he lay there silent and stinking. We then gingerly rolled him on to his side and, using the sheet as a sling, hoisted his reeking body out of the tub and onto our stretcher. Not wanting him to hurt himself -- and, truthfully, not wanting him to touch us -- we applied our soft restraints to his legs and arms so he couldn't flail about.
It was time to get the hell out of there. We raced down the stairs with our poop-packaged patient. Once outside, we hungrily gulped mouthfuls of fresh air like beached guppies left to die on a barren shoreline. Loading him into the rig, we drove our ambulance as if it were a Formula 500 car. Having just spent the previous thirty minutes with this shit-loving psychopath, we had all had enough of him to last a lifetime.
At the hospital, we hastily wheeled our Code Brown into the emergency room, transferred him to a bed, and turned on our shit-stained heels and ran. The expression on the physician's face as he got a look at his new patient was one of pure horror and disgust. I couldn't help but think that the doctor was pulling down at least 100K a year to deal with this lunatic. We did all of this for free -- so I didn't feel much sympathy for him.
Now that the fecal fuck was no longer our responsibility, we still had to clean up all our gear. Everything from the seatbelts on the rig to the blood pressure cuff had to be thoroughly sterilized. We decided to throw out our stethoscopes, though -- who wants to take the risk of shit in their ears?
Back at headquarters, our faces were ashen, our hands trembled, our eyes burned as if we had been hit with Napalm, and none of us could speak. We were numb, spent, almost catatonic, and too shocked to even shower. We had just been to the very gates of the gaping asshole of hell and had lived through it. It is a bond we will share for life.
Time has passed since that fateful day, but it was truly one that will go down in the annals (or anals, if you will) as one of the shittiest calls ever.