Chapter Text
“All I’m saying,” TK clarified, lifting one hand off of the wheel momentarily to offer a placating gesture, “is that not everyone from New York has white-knuckle opinions about bagels.”
“Your dad does,” Nancy replied. She had climbed into the rig that evening with a frown and a too-big Starbucks, something TK had learned meant she would be at least mildly combative all shift. He could hardly blame her; the amount of medical calls recently had been as relentless as they were exhausting.
“My dad has opinions about everything. He decided he didn’t want a cutting from my Wandering Jew because he thought the name was – and I quote – ’troublesome.’”
“In fairness,” Nancy said with a tilt of her head, “that name is skimming the surface of being problematic.”
“It’s just a plant,” TK laughed, exasperated. “And I think I get to decide if it’s problematic or not. He’s not Jewish; I am.”
Nancy pivoted toward him in her seat so that he could be on the receiving end of the full eyebrow raise. “Oh? You speak for the entire Jewish community now?”
“Yes, Nancy. I am the Yiddish Lorax,” TK deadpanned, earning a laugh. “I speak for the Jews.”
“If you want to share your plants, I’ll take some,” Tommy called from the back of the rig. From the sound of her voice, she was only just looking up from the paperwork associated with their last call. It was the interruption that Nancy needed to get back on her soap box, apparently, because after a quick sip from her too-big Starbucks, she got right back to her earlier point.
“Salt bagels are gross.”
“Incorrect,” TK said in a flat, simple tone.
“So you do have opinions about bagels.”
“I have taste buds and a beating heart,” TK corrected with theatrical testiness. He indicated a lane change and slowed with traffic, the rig creaking a bit as its tonnage rolled to a near-stop. Ahead, the red light cast everything in a movie-like glow, punctuated by turn signals and tail lights.
Nancy bounced her eyebrows and lifted her too-big Starbucks back to her lips, mumbling into her drink, “Heart won’t be beating for long with that much sodium.”
“Hey, don’t bring that evil into my rig,” Tommy chided from the back, having leaned forward to join in the conversation. “TK doesn’t need any help inviting medical problems into his life.”
“Wow,” he replied, dragging the word out as long as he could before Tommy reached forward and playfully smacked his shoulder. She opened her mouth to clarify what she meant, but was interrupted by a double beep and the looming tone of a new call over the radio.
“Medic 126, medic 126, be advised: ten-fifty-four. Possible narcotics overdose reported on 12th and Hawley at The Last Drop. Please respond.”
A collective sigh passed through the three of them. TK reached up with one hand and gripped his radio, leaning his head toward it so as to be heard. “Ten-four, dispatch. We’re on our way.”
After dispatch listed a few more specifics – whatever the police had been able to provide before they’d called in medical – Nancy deposited her too-big Starbucks in the cupholder with more attitude than necessary and leaned back in the passenger seat. “Well, that was a nice five-minute mental break.”
TK switched on the sirens just as the lights ahead turned green. He crept forward through the awkward shuffle of cars pulling to either side. “Is it just me, or are overdoses happening way more than usual this week,” he asked, cranking the wheel to the left and breaking free of the gridlock. “Which I know is really saying something.”
Nancy glanced over at him, looking thoroughly exhausted at the observation. “I guess something new could have hit the streets. Cut with who-knows-what.”
If she noticed TK’s grip tightening on the steering wheel, she graciously did not acknowledge it.
It wasn’t that overdoses were triggering for him. They couldn’t be, not with how regularly he had to interact with them during his day job. Old people falling, drunk people brawling, and addicts circling the drain; that was the unceasing parade of calls they dealt with, day in and day out. And, bless them both, neither Nancy nor Tommy tiptoed around TK’s addiction or sobriety. It was rarely relevant, anyway.
If anything, his reaction was one of heightened empathy. The urgency he felt each time a narcotics overdose was called in by dispatch had yet to ebb. It could have been him; it had been him. And even on weeks where he had four tens, where every shift was a back-to-back nightmare of laced fentanyl and combative patients, he still felt that sense of responsibility to do whatever he could.
Carlos liked to remind him that it wasn’t a bad mentality to take out on calls, even if said calls could be deeply exhausting.
They arrived on the scene to flashing lights and a small gathering of uniformed officers already administering aid. TK applied the emergency brake and unbuckled his seatbelt, joining Nancy and Tommy around back to grab their gear. Outside, the white noise of Austin nightlife was undercut by officers ordering people back, and onlookers trying to involve themselves by recounting what had happened from their own points of view.
“Nancy, you start with the narcan; TK, get vitals goings,” Tommy instructed, though after so many identical calls, their routine was so established as to make her leadership unnecessary.
This was their fourth OD of the night.
“Male patient, mid-forties. Unresponsive when we arrived on the scene,” one of the officers said by way of introduction. The patient was sprawled on the sidewalk with his button-up shirt torn open, exposing his undershirt and midriff. A pair of turtle shell glasses lay forgotten on the sidewalk next to him.
“How many doses have you already administered,” TK asked, dropping his bag and taking a knee beside the man. He worked as he talked, setting up his kit and portable monitor, clipping the pulse oximeter to the patient’s cold finger.
“Two,” came the response from somewhere above him. Nancy clapped her fingers against the patient’s cheek a few times in rapid succession, checked under his eyelids, and reached for a dose of intranasal naloxone.
“And he’s still out? Nance, I’m going to start an IV if this one doesn’t work.”
Nancy nodded and rolled her knuckles against the man’s sternum aggressively, watching closely for any sign that it was working. After a few moments without any change, TK got to work. Behind him, he could hear Tommy introduce herself and ask for more information on the patient, all noise that TK didn’t really process as he worked to find a vein.
“Come on, buddy,” he said, raising the volume of his voice and leaning in as the intravenous naloxone took its turn. TK took over rubbing the patient’s sternum, applying an uncomfortable amount of pressure as he did so. “Sir, can you hear me? I need you to open your eyes.”
“I’ve got a pulse coming back,” Nancy observed.
“Sir,” TK tried again, leaning over the patient and right into his personal space. “Come on now, wake up.”
Abruptly, the man opened his eyes. He took a staggered breath, delirious as he began to shift and move around. He moaned, a shapeless sound of confusion and dawning irritation.
“There he is,” Nancy sighed, somewhere between relief and fatigue.
“You’re okay,” TK said, addressing the man in the same patient, authoritative tone. “It’s okay. We’re EMS, we’re here to help.”
“Who are– what’s going on,” the man managed, looking but not really seeing as he lifted his arms to try and get Nancy’s hands away from his face.
“We’re EMS. You overdosed,” TK answered. “Do you know where you are?”
“I’m fine,” the man slurred, continuing to swat at Nancy’s hands as if they were mosquitos. TK took hold of his right arm and lowered it so the IV wouldn’t get dislodged.
“You’re not fine,” TK explained carefully. “You stopped breathing for a minute there. The narcan we gave you won’t last, okay? So we have to take you to the hospital.”
His news was met with resounding disapproval. The man kept writhing, his strength returning to him as the narcan fully reversed his high. With it, as usual, came frustration. TK understood it well, though he wished he didn’t. How much had this man spent on the drugs he had taken? How desperate had he been for that hit? And here comes EMS with their narcan, smashing into his escape with the force of a tsunami, dragging him kicking and screaming back to sobriety.
“Cap, we’re gunna need a hand,” Nancy called, resigned to the patient’s resistance and annoyed in equal measure. The officers standing around moved forward, hands clad in blue medical gloves, reaching to restrain the patient. The man was yelling at them now, insisting he was fine, that he wasn’t going to go to the hospital.
No amount of reason was going to permeate it. TK felt a numbness come over him, his emotional response on hold. There was rarely any use arguing with an addict.
As they were coordinating with one another to lift the patient onto a gurney, the man’s hand broke free from Nancy’s grip. It shot forward, latched onto TK’s collar, and yanked him down with alarming strength. TK only barely managed to brace himself against the man’s chest to stop from being pulled right into him.
“You don’t get it,” the man cried, crazed blue eyes locking with TK’s. “I can’t go to the hospital! I’m not allowed to!”
One of the officers reached forward. She needed to use both of her hands to pry his one fist off of TK’s collar. The man momentarily turned his anger toward her, a punch thwarted by Nancy’s re-established grip on his arm. The officers were barking clear instructions to the patient, who was yelling back. At the rate things were going, he was going to get himself arrested for assault.
“You need to go,” TK said, leaning right back into the man’s face to get his full attention. “Okay? Whatever you took had something nasty in it, and it’ll come back to bite you if you don’t get treatment. Narcan is only temporary; we can’t fix you all the way here. Okay?”
Arguing with patients was often a waste of time. In the state the man was in, he could not make an informed decision for himself, and if they sat around trying to explain protocol, he’d relapse right back into cardiac arrest before they even got him loaded into the rig.
But TK couldn’t help it, sometimes. He knew the fear of waking up stone cold sober surrounded by strangers. He knew the moment of crushing reality when you realized what had happened, the realization that you had done it to yourself. There was nothing more human than the desperate connection you could make with someone in that moment. It only took one person to be a fixed point, a harbor in the storm. Sometimes, if the patient had the opportunity, it could de-escalate the whole scene.
The man locked eyes with him again, the force of his thrashing halved. He stared, searching, breathing hard. His pupils were pinpricks, a sheen of sweat on his face. In his struggling, the IV had done some damage, and coppery blood ran in a smudged line around the side of his arm.
Unexpectedly, the man asked, “You’ll go?”
TK felt himself nodding. “Yhep, I’m going with you. But you gotta let us take you there.”
“In the back with me,” the man clarified, as officers worked around him to get him onto the stretcher while he wasn’t resisting. TK glanced toward Tommy for confirmation before nodding again.
“Yhep. Let’s go. Can you tell me your name?”
The officers hoisted the man up. As soon as he was situated on the stretcher, Nancy and TK started strapping him in.
“Collin,” the man said, watching TK closely, like a child who was afraid of losing their parents at the mall.
“Okay, Collin,” TK repeated. “Do you know what you took tonight?”
He hadn’t ridden in the back of the rig in a while. Tommy took his spot behind the wheel as they loaded up the back, Nancy climbing in first to guide the stretcher into place before locking it in.
“Oxys,” the man murmured, watching as TK pulled the doors shut and slid onto the bench beside him. He checked his vitals on the screen before settling in to fix the IV.
“Just oxys? Nothing else?”
The man shook his head, his focus never leaving TK’s face. If he hadn’t just OD’d on narcotics, TK would have been unnerved. As it was, he started through the standard list of questions: allergies, medications, heart or liver disease, age, anything and everything that could help the ER speed along intake. The man, only moments ago trying to punch an officer in the face, now laid there before him, docile and calm, answering everything without protest.
TK made a mental note to celebrate the little victory later.
In the front of the rig, Tommy called it in. “Ambulance 126 for hospital one, for patient report.”
Irrationally, some part of TK wished he was behind the wheel. He enjoyed radio reports; on less-urgent calls, it reminded him of the resistance pilots in Star Wars, an affiliation that he blamed on his father and would never, ever admit to Nancy. In a thousand years. Ever.
“Copy 126, go ahead.”
“Ambulance 126 is currently en route to your facility,” Tommy continued, an eerie echo of how TK usually handled reports. “Non-emergent at this time with a forty-three year old male. Chief complaint today is going to be a suspected narcotics overdose. The patient was discovered by bystanders–”
Whatever Tommy said – and TK had been listening for the answer, in part to see if she would steal his whole spiel and in part to see if she improved on it – he didn’t hear it over the patient’s interruption.
“Strand,” the patient blurted, pointing his oximeter-clad finger at TK’s nameplate. “Like a DNA strand.”
TK allowed the man a professional chuckle. “Or a beach in Ireland,” he replied, hoping that being amiable would hide his exhaustion.
“Your DNA must be perfect,” the patient – Collin – said, seemingly oblivious to the polite response he had received. “What’s TK stand for?”
The complement and question, without any pause for a reaction in between, was enough to put a baffled smile on TK’s face. Narcotics patients were never boring. “Just TK,” he answered, amused but ever mindful of his own boundaries. He pointed from himself to his partner. “And this is Nancy.”
Collin barely nodded in acknowledgement, still staring. “You’re an angel.”
TK laughed again, genuine and bewildered. “Well,” he said, smiling warmly at the man strapped to the stretcher before him, “we do our best here at the AFD.”
-
TK liked to play a game whenever he and Carlos had conflicting shifts. He tried to think of it as a bonus round, a way to gamify the process of showering and brushing his teeth, even when he didn’t want to. Especially when he didn’t want to.
The stages of the game were simple: get home by 5:45am, so that he could hear Carlos’s first alarm go off. That left him with exactly 20 minutes to shower and brush his teeth before the second alarm went off at 6:05am. (He was better at accomplishing this on the first two days of his four tens, before exhaustion had properly set in.)
If he could be done in the bathroom by the second alarm, he moved on to the bonus round: set out Carlos’s travel mug, the air-tight container of steel cut oats, and vitamins. If he was really doing well, he would even write an inappropriate note and hide it in a random pocket of Carlos’s backpack. Carlos had yet to say anything about them, which either meant he was biding his time to get his own sexy revenge, or that he had a backpack full of very not-safe-for-work post-its that were going to surprise the hell out of him one day.
In spite of it being the third day on shift, TK found himself with 2 minutes to spare before the third and final alarm went off on Carlos’s phone at 6:20am. He left the kitchen without turning the light off, since Carlos would be needing it shortly, and shuffled his way to the bedroom with the grace of a drunk sorority girl. He was so deeply tired, he wouldn’t be surprised if he couldn’t sleep at all.
Which is probably why he climbed directly on top of Carlos instead of sliding into bed beside him like he usually did. “Babe,” he groaned, letting his dead weight squeeze a startled groan out of his fiance.
“Oh my god, TK,” Carlos muttered, not yet properly awake. “Why.”
“Four tens suck,” he answered by way of explanation, resting the side of his face against Carlos’s like it were a pillow.
“You have no room to complain,” Carlos murmured, reaching up to rub at his eyes. “You get to go to sleep. I have to wake up.”
“So many calls last night,” TK yawned, his head lulling down onto his partner’s pillow as Carlos shifted beneath him. “Why can’t people stop dying, for like, a day?”
A broad, warm hand slid around his waist and settled on his lower back. Carlos idly stroked his thumb against TK’s soft sleep shirt. “The nerve of some people.”
“Some people’s kids,” TK agreed. From the bedside table, the third and final alarm started to chime from Carlos’s phone. A deep groan – a grunt, maybe? -- rumbled through Carlos’s chest.
“I gotta get up, babe,” he sighed. TK moaned in protest and stayed where he was for a moment longer before reluctantly rolling off of Carlos’s warm body.
The bed being pre-warmed and smelling like Carlos’s soap was a pale substitute for those more precious mornings when they could wake up together, but TK wasn’t going to complain. He greedily pulled Carlos’s pillow into his arms and held it against his chest as if it were a teddy bear.
“Rough shift?” Carlos yawned, standing from the bed and stretching his arms up and over his head.
TK was relaxing quickly into the warmth his partner had left behind, his energy for conversation flagging by the second. Desperate to get in every second of Carlos time he could, he forced himself to take a deep breath. “So many ODs, Carlos.”
Carlos, for his part, scrunched up his nose and sighed. He looked over his shoulder from where he stood by the open closet. “Any fatalities?”
Clearly, both of them were too tired for emotional labor. TK appreciated the objective question.
“No, actually,” he said, half into the pillow. “Female patient nearly unstrapped herself on the ride to St David’s, though. That was lively.”
“Here’s to Tommy’s deescalation skills.” Carlos rolled out his neck and draped a few pieces of his uniform over one arm to bring with him into the bathroom. TK hummed in agreement and let silence settle back between them, watching with half-lidded eyes as Carlos shucked off his pajamas with one hand. In the early morning light, the lines of his body relaxed something deep inside of TK’s chest.
“Oh, there was this one guy,” TK said abruptly, the memory resurfacing as Carlos walked toward the bathroom. “Woke up after a narcan IV. Weirdly sober the whole ride to the hospital, no crash or anything. He was so combative when he first came around, and then he totally changed when I said I would ride with him. Like, you know how toddlers can stop having a tantrum super abruptly? You never see that on a call like that.”
Carlos leaned his head around the doorframe to the bathroom. He was preparing his toothbrush. “I mean, if I were a patient, I’d calm down as soon as I saw you were my paramedic.”
“We’ve done that roleplay, and you did the opposite of calming down.”
Carlos laughed once, a bolt of sound, before disappearing back into the bathroom. His disembodied voice echoed slightly off the tile. “Sometimes I think you’re allergic to romantic sentiment.”
TK chuckled into his pillow. “Just mediocre attempts at it.”
“You’re the worst.”
“I’ll have you know, that patient said I was an angel.” TK snuggled down into the sheets, aware that Carlos would jump in the shower in a minute, and the lag in conversation would be the final nail in the proverbial coffin. Sleep was only minutes away.
The water turned on. Carlos wouldn’t have to wait for it to heat up – TK had only showered about twenty minutes before – but he still reappeared from the bathroom in nothing but his underwear. He braced his hands on the bed and leaned in to plant a kiss on TK’s temple.
“Angel might be pushing it,” he said into TK’s ear, “but I do love you."
“Love you too,” TK agreed. A thought settled over him then, perhaps brought on by thinking about what Carlos’s shift might hold. Or maybe it simply came back to him because Nancy had pointed it out that morning as they were sanitizing the rig, and he had felt weird about it then, too.
“He said he wasn’t ‘allowed’ at the hospital,” TK muttered. “Isn’t that weird?”
Carlos frowned down at him, but it was a brief expression, accompanied by a shrug. “People say weird shit when they’re under the influence,” he reasoned, before standing back up to his full height to return to the bathroom.
It’s what TK had said to Nancy earlier that morning. And it was an entirely rational thing to say and to think.
But it didn’t really feel right.