The Paramedic Who Knew My Name

“Ma’am, I’m going to take over now. You’ve done great. Let me get in here.”

I could not seem to give up the chest.

“Ma’am. I’ve got him. You can slide back.”

I slid back. I sat on the floor against the lower cabinets with the pull of a drawer handle in my spine, and I held one shaking hand in the other.

The man’s hands went onto Gerald’s chest where mine had been, and I noticed something even then. He was good. He pushed from his shoulders, not his arms, and the rhythm was steady as a clock. He had a close haircut and a short dark beard, a navy uniform shirt with a county patch on the shoulder, and he was somewhere in his thirties. I did not know him. I looked at his face for a full minute and I did not know him from Adam.

The woman with the braid cut Gerald’s pajama top straight up the middle with a pair of shears and pulled it open. She stuck two flat pads on his chest, one high on the right, one low on the left, and plugged the wires into the monitor. A little screen came alive with a green line running across it.

“Stop compressions. Clear for analysis.”

The man lifted his hands and held them up in the air like somebody being robbed.

The line on the monitor was not a line. It was jagged and wild, a scribble, like a child trying to draw the ocean. I did not know what it meant. The woman did.

“V-fib,” she said. “Charging.”

“Everybody clear.”

The man pulled his hands away, the woman said, “Shocking,” and she pressed the button.

Gerald’s whole body jumped off the floor, every muscle at once, and landed again. I made a noise. I do not know what noise.

The line on the screen flattened to a slow wave and then jumped back into the scribble.

“Back on the chest,” the woman said. “Two minutes. Marcus, you want to swap with me in a minute?”

“I’m good for now.”

The woman, whose name tag said Dana, got a line into Gerald’s arm and then a tube into his throat. Somebody read numbers off the screen in a flat voice. Marcus kept pushing, his jaw set but not tight, the way a man holds it when he has done a thing so many times his body does it without him.

“Two minutes,” Dana said. “Clear for analysis.”

Hands up. The jagged line.

“Still V-fib. Charging.”

“Clear.”

He jumped again.

This time the line didn’t go flat and come back. This time it did something else. It slowed. It got tall and slow and regular, little hills in a row, one after another.