Grady Medic

By Tony Trimble

Have you ever looked at a passing ambulance's flashing lights and screaming siren and thought, "What are they doing?" or "What's going on in there?"

You are about to vicariously live a paramedic's life where there is little connective tissue between the chapters, and this was done intentionally. As a paramedic, you never know what the next call into your ambulance will bring into your professional life. I wanted you to have that self-same experience in your comfy chair. The tales may be funny, tragic, or make you scratch your head as you say, "What the hell?', or leave you with a sense of relief and wonder. That is the world that my Grady Medics and I have lived throughout our careers.

You may be taken to training or see things as a field supervisor sees it happen while working with his employees. The timeline of this story begins normally with how a country boy from the rural area of Jackson, Georgia got into this outlandish field as one of the pioneers of EMS and found himself working at Grady EMS. After that happens, strap in for a rollercoaster ride through history. Yes, the stories and tales told are all true to the life of a medic; some are mine and other calls belong to my friends from that era.

Let me begin by saying that I had a job that I truly loved. Hell, I probably would have done it for free because it was that much fun. I spent 27 years as a paramedic working for Grady Memorial Hospital's Emergency Medical Service (1980 to 2007). Grady EMS, at that time, ran 200 to 300 calls in a 24 hour period.

These stories are about the calls run by our paramedics and EMT's. These men and women who wear the title of 'Grady Medic' are my heroes. They provided emergency medical care in the worst possible situations within the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia without seeking praise or glory for their performance. I plan to introduce you to people who are actual 'unsung heroes' because their stories need to be heard. I am humbled in their presence because these men and women are the best at what they do: saving lives.You watched the news; we lived it. To quote one of my medics, Bill Marbury, "When you see people running away from a situation, we're the crazy ones running in."

Before you begin to read this novel, please understand that paramedics are unique in their approach to daily life. If you're easily offended or have delicate sensitivities, please close the book now. Our reality, and that of the people we served, is a brutal existence in the high poverty areas of Atlanta. We were the voice of our patients and acted as gateway into the medical care system for Grady Memorial Hospital's emergency rooms for some of the poorest areas of Atlanta. Our Grady Medics hold themselves to the highest standards of delivering compassionate, high quality emergency medical care. It is, was, and will always be our core belief.

If you have the nerve; strap in and let's go to work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798989173518

Book preview

Chapter 1

Grady EMS New Employee Orientation Class—First Lecture

(Conducted several times every year from 1980 through 2000)

Good morning, I am Tony Trimble. I am a Field Training Officer (FTO) for Grady EMS. For now, we’ll skip who I am and what I do. It isn’t important information for you right now. However, what we do—me, you, and all the medics upstairs do daily—is something that you should think about and etch in your minds from here on out. Once that blue EMS uniform goes on, you are more than a person or a medic riding in an ambulance. You are becoming a Grady medic.

As a Grady EMS employee, you represent this hospital and our mission into the city of Atlanta. Despite what you may have heard or thought you knew before today, let me clarify your new facts of life. Grady Memorial Hospital is not just a county hospital for the poor people living in Fulton County. In fact, no statement could be further from the truth. You are standing in a building filled with the highest-quality medical care, true legends of the medical community, and a living history of Atlanta itself.

Your new career began by filling out an application at the Human Resources office, now housed in a building that was the original Grady Hospital one hundred years ago. The building you are sitting in is not just a hospital; this is an important community hub where generations and generations of Atlantans have been born and died. It would strain the limits of your imagination to calculate the number of people who have been treated as patients within the walls of Grady Memorial Hospital since it came into being.

Moving forward to here and now, Grady Memorial is the clinical training site for physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists, and many other medical specialists. Two medical schools train physicians within this building. Medical residents learn specialized knowledge during their residency programs covering the spectrum of modern medical practice. What happens here is the cutting-edge level of medical science that is building us toward the medical arts shaping the future for mankind’s care.

You are the faces of Grady Memorial Hospital that the people of our community will see every day. You, as our representative, have a message to deliver to the public. Grady Memorial Hospital is a trauma center and medical facility delivering cutting edge medical care to the public. Our hospital’s services are available to anyone during their time of need. It is imperative that you embrace the fact that you, as a medic for Grady Emergency Medical Service, are the first link in beginning that medical care process. You are the face that Grady Memorial Hospital wears when driving an ambulance within the city of Atlanta. You are the representative that the public sees. Always be aware of this. Be proud of your status as a member of our team and our hospital.

You will spend the next several weeks in orientation learning our style of pre-hospital medical care. It is physically demanding and mentally taxing because of the obligation for quality care that we owe to the community. Every patient can and will be given the best medical care possible, and it will be done each time a call comes in. That is our responsibility. That is our standard. That is our obligation. You are now taking your first steps toward becoming a Grady Medic, and believe me when I say that you will earn the right to call yourself a Grady medic. Just putting on a blue shirt and pretty patch doesn’t cut it. You will prove yourself time and again to the toughest critics in this world: your peers. They will be closely observing your performance and professional behavior while you work in the streets. Don’t think for an instant that if you make a mistake or act unprofessionally that they will tattle to a supervisor. Your peers take a much more in your face approach to problem-solving because your poor performance reflects badly upon them.

After all the years spent working here, I am still learning new facts and skills to improve my job performance every day. You will too. While working here, you will see things that you won’t believe and do things that you wouldn’t believe possible. The city of Atlanta will probably be an alien environment for many of you. You will adapt. You will make friendships that last a lifetime. You will experience elation and heartbreak. You will become the best medic available to this community. You may think it bluster when we say that Grady EMS is second to none. It isn’t. Our emergency medical care is, and will continue to be, without compare. When you tell someone that you are a Grady medic, they will be both impressed and intimidated because it means that you have repeatedly performed and delivered the highest-quality emergency medical care to people in the most chaotic environment imaginable and thrived as a medic.

You will continue Grady’s legacy by becoming an intrinsic member of this Grady EMS community. Here is your message to the citizens of Atlanta: You are a person who can be relied upon to take care of them when no one else will. You are a hand to help them when they are abandoned by the rest of the world. You will grow and change. Then, one day down the road, the truth of the statements will hit you: You will understand why our medics are so proud to say, We are Grady EMS.

Welcome to our family.

Chapter 2

A bit of historical background for you.

Grady Memorial Hospital opened its doors to Atlanta in 1892. There are no true records as to when the ambulance service originally began; however, historical photographs show a horse-drawn wagon used as an ambulance in the early days. The stable was located on the grounds behind the old hospital. It should be noted that the basic job description of transporting patients, providing medical care, and shoveling horseshit remains intact to this day. The primary difference between then and now, with respect to shoveling horseshit, is nothing more than having the concept evolve over time from removing horse apples from a stable into the state-mandated paperwork filled out after each call. Both concepts have been eternally greeted with the same level of enthusiasm by the people working in the ambulance.

The evolution from ambulance service to Emergency Medical Service began in the early 1970s with the introduction of the Basic EMT certification for patient care providers working on the ambulance. Paramedic (Advanced EMT) training programs and the issuance of licenses to perform advanced medical care began in the mid-1970s.

My adventures in EMS began in 1975 with a Basic EMT certification number of 5838 and a license issued with the Paramedic number of 337 in 1978. I began my employment at Grady Memorial Hospital as a Paramedic in 1980. This year marked the beginning of a life-changing carnival ride that I wouldn’t have missed for anything.

When I concluded my service with Grady EMS in 2007, I shed a tear for the ending of a career spent working side by side with some of the greatest rogues, ruffians, and heroes to ever grace this planet. This novel, a very loose use that descriptive term, is simply a collection of tales about how it all started and the life I lived at Grady EMS in the city of Atlanta, Georgia. Grab a beer and have a chuckle or two. I had fun … maybe you will too.

Chapter 3

To begin with an ending …

In a world of managed health care, centralized dispatch services, master’s degree-laden managers, and bean-counters coming out the ass, I found myself to be a dinosaur teetering on the cusp of extinction within my world of Emergency Medical Services. I also found myself regaling my progressively younger partners about times, people, and calls long past in a world where EMS was in its infancy. The kids working with me would describe my stories as tales of the Wild West, and in a way, it was.

Then, one bright spring morning, a young medic asked me a fateful question, Is it still fun?

I paused in thought over the question itself, my less than stellar opinion about the direction of modern EMS management, and the myriad of ongoing changes to the concept of delivering patient care within my professional home at Grady EMS. Without saying another word, a decision arose from deep within my soul. I stepped out of the ambulance, walked into the manager’s office, and resigned my beloved position as a paramedic at Grady EMS. The EMS dinosaur quietly stepped off into the tarpits of eternity.

When asked why by my manager, I gave the candid response of, I told myself long ago that when the job wasn’t fun anymore, I would quit immediately. Today is that day. Those words closed out a career of twenty-seven years spent on the streets of Atlanta working for Grady EMS.

However, before I plod any deeper into that tarpit of time that now contains so many of my brothers and sisters, allow me to tell you about an interval of life when Emergency Medical Services was a fun job, our actions mattered, and life was so much simpler for the medics doing the job. My story is our story—a tale of the most misbegotten misfits ever lumped together to deliver emergency medical care in an urban landscape alien to places that polite society prefers to call home.

We are, and will always be, Grady EMS, and our medics are still second to none.

Chapter 4

Georgia 1967

What is the impetus, that single turning point in a life that prompts an otherwise sane individual to choose a career as a paramedic in a high-volume Emergency Medical Services system where chaos reigns supreme?

My exact moment of origin and movement toward a life spent in emergency care began when a car hit my dog. Now, I would love to tell you that I found myself to be a calm, situationally aware nine-year-old boy who methodically evaluated the situation and acted in the best interests of the injured. Not even close. The truth of the matter is that I ran screaming away from the scene and abandoned my beloved pet in a blind panic. It was fortunate for Tippy (the dog) that my mother was an Emergency Room nurse who chose to ignore her screaming child and render medical aid where it was needed at that moment. Despite my complete absence of composure, aid, and assistance in her time of need, I can report that Tippy did live to the ripe old age of eighteen years to die quietly in her sleep at our home.

The driving force that did arise from that panic-stricken moment was an overwhelming sense of acute embarrassment at my inability to act when the situation called for decisive actions and a calm demeanor. From this arose a pointed question: How does a person learn these specific traits and behaviors? It wasn’t part of the educational process being taught in grade school.

I found my answer in the form of a motorcycle rider who went sailing past the passenger-side car window of our family car during a Sunday trip to my grandmother’s house. No, I don’t mean that he drove past us at a high rate of speed. The motorcycle rider was, in fact, flying in the air after having another car knocked his motorcycle out from under him. As I recall, the man had the most incredulous look upon his face, as if to say, This is a most vexing situation, while he passed within mere inches in front of the eyes of the young boy staring back at him through a car window.

The man’s body struck the grassy median along the roadway with an audible thump and then lay there, unmoving. My mother ran to the fallen rider’s side to assist him while she directed my father to check on the driver of the car involved in the collision. Not wanting to stay in the stultifying air of a station wagon on a hot summer afternoon, I hopped out of the car and wandered over to the roadside where my mother was tending to the fallen motorcyclist. Little did I know that my life as a medic was about to begin in earnest.

Mom looked around the area to find someone to assist in turning over the facedown motorcyclist. That was when she realized that her idiot son, who was supposed to still be sitting in the family car, happened to be her only available help. I will never forget the calm, controlled nature of her words fueled by the intensity of her eyes as she said, I need to turn him over, and you are going to help me. You need to remember that we are the only help that this man has until we can get him into a hospital. Trust me, you can do this. Okay?

I was thoroughly intrigued and amazed at this moment of my life. This was not the same woman who fixed breakfast for me and my younger brothers. This was not the same person who tucked me gently into bed at night. What I saw was another, very different woman focused on delivering care in a tightly controlled manner while making the best use of her available resources in a dire situation. You might want to add to this situation that I also had a child’s macabre fascination with icky things best left unspoken in polite company. Suffice it to say that you could not have chased me away from her side with a stick at that moment of my life.

Turning over an injured person, be the first or the thousandth time that you do it, carries a surprise factor that always tickles that squeamish point in the pit of your stomach. It is the unspoken certainty that whatever lay hidden from your view is probably going to be bad. The lesson learned on this occasion was that striking the ground in a face-first manner with your mouth open is not a good plan. The motorcyclist had tried to dig a furrow with his lips and gotten a mouth filled with dirt for his efforts. I should note that this was also the first moment in my life when I heard my mother, who was a soft-spoken church deacon’s wife, utter the words, Oh … You are shitting me! in an exasperated voice as she observed the man’s mouth filled with dirt and grass.

Without hesitation, she began digging out the various particles of debris with a finger as she calmly gave me instructions to pull the motorcycle rider up onto his side. When a leg flopped loosely onto the ground alongside me, I brought this to her attention. Mom glanced down at the shattered leg, shrugged her shoulders at me, and replied, That is the least of his problems. I can only guess that I had a perplexed expression at her casual dismissal of the problem where it appeared that he had a boneless leg. She gave a loud sigh without slowing her efforts as she explained, If he can’t breathe, he dies. I need to get his airway opened.

Mom’s efforts were rewarded with a choking cough and a small plume of soil as the rider began to slowly revive under her hands. When my father arrived at her side, I suspect that I was the last thing he expected to find in the middle of the utter chaos found at a roadway collision. Mom ended any potential chastisement of an unruly child being outside of the family station wagon with a quiet statement of, He’s been a big help to me.

Dad, who was a telephone engineer by trade, simply shook his head in disbelief at the damaged rider and his idiot son before leaving to check to see if any of the other children had strayed from the family car into traffic.

I can’t really recall anything beyond her speaking to the man in quiet, reassuring terms as we waited for the ambulance to arrive. Each sentence was a reinforcement of her belief that he would survive the incident and be fine once he was under the care of a doctor. Throughout the entire interminable wait, she kept him focused on her with questions about his family. Each question was carefully phrased to keep him focused on reasons to continue to live. To this day I can clearly recall the spark of hope in his eyes as he lay exposed and gravely injured under the hot summer sun in Georgia.

At that moment, little did I know that this situation was to be repeated later on countless occasions throughout my adult life.

Chapter 5

June 1975

Jackson, Georgia

The premiere of the television show Emergency about fire service paramedics in Los Angeles pointed me toward a career path that suited both me and my dreams. However, they were in California, and I was in rural Georgia; that was a bit problematic. However, my opportunity arose with the offering of a 120-hour Basic Emergency Medical Technician class at Griffin-Spalding Vo-Tech under the instruction of Chief Ronnie Wright. I was in heaven two nights a week as he lectured on emergency medical care. We were challenged academically, and I loved working on the classroom floor practicing new skills on my classmates. Phil Petty with the state of Georgia taught us how to gleefully rip apart wrecked cars to gain access to a patient within the twisted metal. Dwayne Norris, who I later worked alongside with at Grady EMS years later, was just as elbow-deep in the training as I was. It was a dream come true for young men and women wanting that life.

The state of Georgia had decided that I was now officially qualified as an Emergency Medical Technician. I was issued my license number of 5838. The hysterical part of this entire situation was that I was only seventeen years of age when licensed. It was also unique that I happened to be the only licensed EMT in the entire county where I resided. Our local ambulance service was tickled to have me as their employee and were willing pay me $100.00 per week to ride the ambulance on a 24/7 basis. When you added in the fact that we were operating out of Sherrill’s Funeral Home and he was also the coroner, I was ecstatic.

The biggest plus to all this employment stuff was that since I became a high school senior that September, the high school principal had agreed to allow me to leave class if an emergency call happened. How cool is that? I was the envy of my classmates when I had to scoot out of a boring class on a call in that big white Cadillac ambulance/hearse from the funeral home.

Chapter 6

Day 1 on the Ambulance

August 1975

Sherrill’s Funeral Home

Jackson, Georgia

This shit storm is definitely not like anything that Captain Wright taught us in class. In the space of less than eight hours, I had taken six people to the local hospital for a variety of problems where most of the time I didn’t have the first clue about what was wrong with them. Not only that, but we had to shift all the equipment over into a hearse because the designated ambulance was being repaired. The driver, my partner Chuck, just laughed at my discomfort at riding in a true funeral home Cadillac hearse as he said, Either way it goes, we still get them. This was not a very comforting thought for the newbie.

Chuck McCracken, who worked for the funeral home for years, was an anomaly of humanity. He stood 5’2", wore size 12 shoes, and had eyeglasses with lenses as thick as the bottom of a Coca-Cola bottle. Envisioning Chuck’s appearance requires you to call to mind the image of a laughing leprechaun with a delightfully twisted sense of humor. Whereas the ordinary person might discount his visual impairment as unfortunate, they had yet to have the pleasure of spending ten minutes in a speeding ambulance moving at an ungodly pace down a narrow country road with him laughing in a maniacal manner behind the steering wheel. Furthermore, Chuck believed stop signs and traffic lights are nothing more than a series of bothersome suggestions. In the first few hours, I had found that my most comfortable position in the speeding hearse was to be with my seat belt tightly latched, both feet firmly planted on the dashboard, and my hands locked in a white-knuckled grip on whatever surface was available. If life flashes past your eyes at the same speed as this damned hearse was moving, my seventeen years of existence had blipped past in two seconds.

The emergency call had come in from the local prison for a woman collapsed in the outside parking lot. This white tornado of a hearse tore down the mile-long driveway to the facility with reckless abandon as the prison guards waved to urge us to hurry up. The hearse slid sideways to a stop alongside a car where a woman lay, unmoving.

As I emerged from my seat, I could see that she was a young woman with a ghostly white complexion lying with deathly stillness on the hot asphalt. A group of people had gathered around her prone body in a loose semi-circle while they waited for me to do something.

Being the new professional that I was, I shook her and asked her to open her eyes, no response. Okay … Okay … What the hell is that sequence again? Airway? I tilted her head back. So far, so good. Breathing? I leaned down with my ear and cheek over her mouth while looking for chest rise. Jesus … She had the biggest tits that I have ever seen.

Wait a minute! They weren’t moving, and I didn’t hear her breathing. The book says that I’m supposed to do mouth-to-mouth breathing, and I don’t even know her. What happens if she wakes up and thinks that I’m kissing her? I better check again to see if she’s breathing. Nope, she definitely wasn’t breathing.

Locking lips, I gave four forceful breaths into her mouth. Spontaneous breathing, no. An eruption of stomach contents, yes! I turned to the side and spit out the shared meal onto the loose gravel at my knees before beginning to sweep out her airway with my fingers. Oh shit, this is nasty. Who has chili dogs for lunch before deciding to die? The bystanders were starting to vomit. Dear God, can’t I catch a break here!

Chuck rolled the stretcher over to us and told me that the suction canister in the hearse was working. At least something looks like it might be going right here. Dumping the flaccid woman on the stretcher, I gave her two more breaths of air while trying to ignore the taste of re-warmed chili in her mouth. A bystander helped Chuck roll the stretcher to the hearse while I continued to give mouth-to-mouth while fighting to restrain my rebelling stomach with each breath. Inside of the ambulance, I turned on the suction machine and looked at the adapter piece at the end of the tubing. Shit, a teeny-tiny hole just wasn’t going to work here with chunks of crap everywhere. I snatched the adapter off before shoving the open tube itself into her mouth. Loads of loathsome debris passed into a waiting clear container. Two more breaths and I felt the side of her throat for a pulse.

None … damn it. Okay … time for chest compressions. The landmark is two finger widths above the xiphoid process at the base of the sternum. I found the point to put my hands down and compress downward. Sweet baby Jesus! Her bra made it feel like I was doing chest compressions on a frigging trampoline without coming close to touching her chest wall. What the hell do I do now? Ask Chuck.

Chuck shouted from the driver’s seat for me to pull her bra out of the way. WHAT??? I’m not a pervert. Chuck yelled for me to move the damned bra up her chest. I pulled open her shirt and snatched the bra up higher onto her chest. My seventeen-year-old I’ve never seen tits in real life before hormones locked a fixed battle with the internal mental process of I’ve got to start her heart. As I thumped up and down on her chest, the only thought running through my mind was, If she wakes up back here, I am going to have a hell of a lot of explaining to do. Fifteen compressions and two breaths. Fifteen compressions and two breaths. Come on, damn it, do something! The pattern continued unabated until the ambulance backed into the entry of the local emergency room. The doctor and nurses pulled the stretcher out of the hearse. Sweating and exhausted, I climbed out of the hearse to follow them inside of the hospital.

Dr. Newman felt for a pulse and smiled, We’ve got a weak pulse. Immediately, he began barking out orders for medications before slamming the door in my face. I simply dropped into a boneless heap to lean my head against the cool wood of the door. Damn …

A hand dropped down onto my shoulder as I heard Chuck say, Come on. We’ve got a bad wreck on the interstate. John’s going to meet us there.

John Sherrell owned the funeral home and ambulance service and was the county coroner—a sort of macabre one-stop shop for all stages for the human condition. However, even as green as I was, I knew that law enforcement calling for the coroner before calling for the ambulance itself boded for very bad things arriving in my immediate future. Furthermore, it didn’t help that Chuck looked me straight in the eye to ask, Have you ever seen a body before?

A question phrased like this is a warning of bad things being served on a cracker because he never said the word patient, he said body. However, I was going to be damned if I let him see that anything about the idea rattled me. Of course, I have. What I didn’t bother to add was that the corpses were all nicely dressed relatives who were tucked neatly into a box for burial at the time. However, in my line of seventeen-year-old masculine thinking, I was comforting myself with the underlying thought of How bad could it actually be?

Bad … bad … real bad … Death, as I was to shortly learn, falls into the multiple categories of dead, really dead, and Oh my God dead. Never being one for taking half-steps in my life, I seem to have somehow opted into skipping straight ahead to the Oh my God dead for my first trauma call.

A young woman had been driving without her seat belt at a high rate of speed on the interstate through Butts County when she somehow veered into a bridge pillar. Physics dictates that a body in motion will remain in motion. Therefore, she continued to fly forward despite the abrupt halt of the car. Somewhere amid the breaking glass and shearing metal of impact, she lost her head … yes, literally.

Such was the situation when we arrived at the scene of the collision. Remarkably, I felt that I was rather composed while we removed the corpse from the car, as you can handle human remains rather easily with your eyes tightly shut. When the body bag was zipped tight, I felt relief in having handled the ghastly moment as well as I did.

That was the moment when I saw John blissfully smile at me while holding a single plastic trash bag in his hand. I will grant you that I really don’t connect the dots of life’s puzzle together too well sometimes, because I was baffled. He silently pointed a single finger toward something lying in the distance along the side of the interstate. It seems that our human jigsaw puzzle was missing a piece. This lesson in physics was that a displaced human head doesn’t have the awareness to neatly plop itself onto the ground at the foot of the collision. Oh no, it shares the kinetic energy of a kicked soccer ball bouncing away from the site at 70 mph.

Being a somewhat less than stellar, newly hired EMT standing with both his bosses on his first day on the job, I asked