The Smoke Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

drops her feet and rips off his helmet and face piece and yells, “Somebody bring a vent kit! Gum’s got another victim here.”
    Twenty feet away an empty wheelchair sits beside a team of firefighters doing CPR on the man I brought out earlier. One of the CPR team is the neighbor I knocked down—a local doctor, I learn later—nose still crusted with blood from our collision.
    We begin working on the woman. She isn’t breathing, and neither Tronstad nor I can find a pulse.
    When you do CPR on somebody, it’s not like on TV where they have a shirt on. The first thing you do is bare the chest. Then there’s the electrodes, one under the right clavicle and one below the left nipple, on the ribs. Tronstad rips her nightgown open and begins ninety seconds of CPR, the current protocol.
    Somebody brings vent kits, and we hook her up to the electrodes on the Physio-Control Lifepak. I get out the plastic bag mask and begin pumping air into her lungs, working in sync with Tronstad, two breaths after every fifteen of his compressions. Eventually more firefighters and a medic assist in the resuscitation effort. Tronstad continues the chest compressions. I stick with the bag mask, forcing oxygenated air into her lungs.
    Under the direction of the Seattle fire paramedic, we shock her three times, beginning CPR anew after each shock. Johnson spells Tronstad on the chest compressions while I shrug off proposals of relief. As I kneel over her and use the bag mask, I try not to drip sweat onto her.
    A pretty woman, she looks to be in her early sixties.
    We shock her again, but she doesn’t come around. Across the yard they aren’t having any better luck with the man.
    This is my fault. I saw off a piece of ass, and my negligence kills two people.
    These two citizens have done nothing more than entrust their lives to the city. I’ve been hired by the city to fight fires and save lives. I’ve been trained and sworn in, and while my duties and responsibilities on the tailboard are minimal, my failure has resulted in this fiasco. I deserve to be jailed. Buggered. Hanged. You name it. They can’t devise a punishment severe enough for me.
    Finally, after what seems like hours but what I later learn is twenty minutes, after several firefighters have offered to spell me with the bag mask and I have refused each, our patient is pronounced dead by a medic, confirmed by a doctor on the phone, and we are told to cease CPR.
    Somebody takes the Laerdal bag mask out of my hands and speaks gently.
    “She’s gone, man. You did your best.”
    Eventually I stand and remove my MSA backpack. I am in another space. Another time. For a few minutes I am as disembodied and removed from this world as the woman at my feet.
    It is hard to imagine any more crap falling out of the sky anytime soon.

5. GET OUT THE UMBRELLA, PAL
    ACROSS THE YARD they are packing the man from the wheelchair onto a gurney and running him down the street, to the rear of Medic 32, one firefighter following along doing chest compressions, another at the head with the bag mask.
    It turns out only Engine 29 and Engine 36 have responded directly to the address. Engine 32, Ladder 11, Medic 32, and Battalion 7 have all gone wrong and arrived late. One of many bad addresses in our district, this Arch Place is located about seven blocks from another Arch Place, and the two aren’t directly connected. Most of the response, including Chief Abbott, who’d been at Station 32 when the alarm came in, followed the relief driver on Engine 32 to the wrong location.
    To make matters worse, the other Arch Place is a narrow, contorted street that once populated with oversized fire apparatus becomes a nightmare to navigate. The mistake costs the bulk of our incoming response units between six and ten minutes in lost time, which explains why we had no help inside.
    Unbuttoning my bunking coat until I feel the cool night air kissing my wet shirt, I walk over to Engine 29 and sit on the step below our