Page 86 of Second Alarm
"Vitals?" I ask, approaching with the Jaws of Life machine.
"Pulse one-thirty, BP's holding, airway open, GCS fourteen." Hanna doesn't look at me. "She's got a fractured femur and I'm worried about her pelvis. Get me space in thirty seconds."
"Copy."
"Thirty, Ty."
"Copy."
Derek is on the other door with the spreaders. We work. I don't look at Hanna. Hanna doesn't look at me. We talk in numbers and joints and hydraulics, my hands doing the job they were trained to do, and the first door comes off in twenty-two seconds. Hanna slips under the sill with her stretcher frame and her medical pack, and we both stop being two people and become the machine at the seam between crisis and not-crisis.
"Cal — status on the truck."
"Foam blanket going down. I want you out of there in under six."
"Copy six."
"Five if you can."
"Copy five."
Derek and I spread the B pillar. Hanna, on the inside, is talking to the driver. The driver's name, I learn by accident, is Maureen. Maureen is sixty-seven, on her way to visit her sister in Hamilton, and upside down in a sedan, asking Hanna whether she's going to make it in time for dinner because she's supposed to bring the ham. Hanna says, in her transport voice:Maureen, you're going to Missoula General and they're going to give you something extremely nice for pain, and then you and yoursister are going to eat the ham next week, and when you do I want a photo, because I love a ham.Maureen laughs — better than screaming — and I don't take my eyes off the B pillar, but I'm aware, on a frequency I can't afford to be on, that I'm in love with a woman who can talk a sixty-seven-year-old with a possible pelvic fracture into a laugh about ham.
The pillar goes. The seat releases. Hanna, Ruiz, and I rotate Maureen onto the board. Derek is already clearing space for the stretcher. The board comes out. We get her onto the gurney. Ruiz is hustling toward the ambulance while Hanna stays back for the secondary survey — twenty seconds on the shoulder, ear to chest — and Maureen is loaded, Ruiz is rolling, and Hanna turns back to the scene.
And as she turns, the truck shifts.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing loud. The box truck, sitting on its side on the other side of the median, moves about three inches on the jacks Cal has been setting. It's a specific physics event: the truck isn't going to tip further, isn't going to catch, just settling its own weight differently against the jacks — and in doing so transfers four thousand pounds through a length of lever that, on the ground, terminates under the left boot of Cal Larsen.
Cal doesn't see it coming.
Cal is watching the foam blanket go down.
Cal makes the small backward movement of a man who's realized too late that the ground is now where the truck is and goes under the edge of the lever at an undignified angle.
He isn't crushed.
He's clipped.
Clipped is a different thing than crushed.
Clipped, at four thousand pounds through a lever, puts Cal Larsen on his back in the gravel with his shoulder out of the joint and his head striking the rim of the truck bed on the way down at exactly the speed and angle that takes him out of the game.
Rivera sees it first.
Rivera yells: "MAN DOWN."
Derek and I are over the median at a run.
Here is what I do in the next sixty seconds.
I don't think about Hanna.
I don't think about whether Cal is my best friend.
I don't think about the thing we did to him.
I think about GCS. Pulse. Airway. Whether his head is still attached to his neck the way it was two minutes ago. I get down in the gravel. I check his pupils. They respond. He's out — all-the-way out.
