Riding the Lightning by Anthony Almojera

Author:Anthony Almojera [Almojera, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Picture this: An EMS station in New York City. It’s a morning in early spring 2020. Outside the station, there’s a big truck. It’s full of boxes. The doors to the station are open. Smiling EMS workers unload the boxes from the truck. They pass them hand to hand in a line. An EMS lieutenant ticks off items on a list. Another member directs the boxes to the storage area downstairs. The boxes contain N95 masks of all sizes, gowns, gloves, face shields. Cots so that service members can sleep at the station if they need to. Pillows, blankets. Microwavable meals. Washing machines so they can launder contaminated uniforms.

In the middle of all the activity, Lillian Bonsignore, the EMS chief, arrives. She climbs onto the step of an ambulance that’s parked outside the station. The members gather around. She delivers a rousing speech: “We’re facing the unknown. It’s going to be hard. But we’ve got your backs. We are all in this together. And remember,” she says, “we’re New York’s Best!”

That would have been a heartening scene, right? Like a rousing movie sequence in which whistling soldiers set up camp in preparation for war.

Sadly, it never happened.

There was no truck bursting with supplies. There was no visit from the EMS chief. There was no line of cheerful EMTs. The fire department continued to send buck slips—internal memos about which mask to wear and when to wear it, what PPE to use, how to triage a suspected COVID case. But they provided little in the way of supplies. And less in the way of moral support.

To be fair, a couple of stations did receive washing machines.

With little guidance from the higher-ups, we’d tried to handle the preparations ourselves. During the first week of March, I’d gone down into the basement of Station 40 with Bones to look at our stocks of masks and gowns. Bones was in charge of keeping track of basic life support supplies for the station. The basement was stacked with BLS materials: four-inch-square gauze bandages used for most wounds; neck braces; stair chairs; oropharyngeal airways (hook-shaped tubes used to keep patients’ airways open); sterile water for washing wounds; cold packs; obstetrical kits (infant swaddle, placenta bag); urinals; plastic tubs for stowing needles and other sharps. There was a box of red felt Christmas stockings, each decorated with a member’s name. A plastic Christmas tree.

Bones and I counted the boxes of N95 masks. There were half a dozen—that added up to a few hundred masks.

That was nothing out of the ordinary. In normal times, very few people wore masks of any kind. If you had a patient who was coughing or vomiting, you’d wear a surgical mask, one of the blue and white ones that New Yorkers snapped up during the early days of the pandemic. Those we had boxes and boxes of.

Surgical masks are made of polypropylene, a nonwoven papery substance that allows air to pass through it but not droplets of moisture. So if you’re wearing a surgical mask and somebody sprays blood on you, the mask will catch those droplets.

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