Are those really cockroaches?

Thanks to Jen for inspiring today's blog...

I head heard about them...The family that was so nasty the firefighters didn't even want to go inside. The house that you could smell from around the corner. The people that no one wanted to even touch.

I gave into the false sense of security..."They don't live in my zone, so I won't ever have to pick them up,"

Until I had to travel to another station to cover someone out sick....

I got the quick run down from the firefighters and my partner.

*Hold your breath
*Don't touch anything
*Scoop the patient and run
*Don't take anything in with you
*Don't let them touch you


So by the time they were done reading me the litany of dont's, I was thoroughly grossed out and VERY glad that I had brought an extra change of clothes with me.

If you don't know much about EMS people, it's that we are a superstitious group. We don't polish our boots much because as soon as you do, you go on a nasty call in the mud or get a really bloody trauma call. We don't wash the truck until the END of our shift because as soon as you do, you'll be off roading in it to reach a patient.

So, if there is a patient or a household that we do NOT want to go to, we talk around it...We never mention the address or the people by name because somehow, they know that you are talking about them and they call...

And of course, that is exactly what happened. The tones dropped for 1234 ABC avenue. If looks could have killed, I would be 6 feet under by now.

I let my student ride up front and as we went around the corner, I could smell the odor coming out of the house before we even pulled up in front of it. The fire captain handed me a little bottle of peppermint oil and told me to dab it on the end of my nose. Then they pulled out the boot covers and the trauma sleeves--and I'm thinking "Oh hell, what have I gotten myself into?"

As soon as we hit the front door, I was overcome with the nastiness of the house. The smell was overpowering. I felt like I was standing in the middle of a landfill. The carpet squished when you walked on it, there was so much crap piled up in the house that we couldn't even fit the cot in the doorway. The walls were supposed to be white, I think, but there were smeared handprints and dirt on them. You could see the lines in the walls where the drywall had obviously gotten wet. There were baby cockroaches crawling up the wall.....

So I finally pick my way through the house to the room where the patient is. I poke my head in the door and everything looked under control, so I made a beeline outside to the fresh air. On my way out, I made the mistake of peeking into the bathroom. No wonder the floor was squishy...the shower had boxes piled in it, I never did see the toilet, and there was no way to wash your hands. There were literally paths through the house but it wasn't just "stuff" hoarding. It was literally piles of human waste and other things I shall not mention here.

In the unit, I prepped for the patient. Vent fan on, windows open, fan on. Change gloves and then double glove. Towels on the floor to stand on.

The patient was clearly not well taken care of. She had dried food on her face and clothes and obviously hadn't been bathed because her belly button was crusted shut. The foulest odor came off of her as we tried to unwrap the sheets to perform at least a cursory assessment. Before re-wraping her, we noticed something moving under her gown. I didn't want to look, truly I didn't...

It was a cockroach. A teeny tiny cockroach. I think I screamed.

I used an entire bottle of disinfectant to clean the back of the truck, spray the passenger seat, and wet my uniforms so that I could not gross myself out on the way back to the station where I promptly chucked my uniform in a biohazard bag and showered for nearly 20 minutes.

Gross. I have never been so horrified in my life.

Assisting the Public?

She was 90 something years old and we were dispatched because she fell.

Her house was like this amazing travel through time and a huge lesson in hoarding. I swear this lady NEVER through anything away. Please let me tell you some of the things that I found while poking around her house:

Plastic bags--the grocery store kind
Ok, so it's one thing to save to Walmart bags to use as trash bags or to carry your lunch to and from work. However, there were literally 50 years of plastic bags in this house and everything was stored in plastic, EVERYTHING....There were bags of bags hanging from the door jambs, the refrigerator door handle, the spindles for the kitchen chair backs, and her walker.

Prescription bottles
It's one thing to save a bottle or two for various things around the house. I've used them for storing nuts and bolts in my workshop before. It's totally another thing to have the past 30 years worth of empty prescription bottles in bags sitting around the house. EMPTY. With the labels still attached on some of them.

Take out food containers
About a hundred of them. Sitting on top of the refrigerator in the basement (Florida room?), towering stacks of them that threatened to fall like the leaning tower of Pisa.

Magazines
Hundreds of them, varying titles from the past 10 years, at least.

The woman had so much stuff in her house that she had made a path just wide enough to fit her walker through. It was amazing to see. I don't ever want to end up like that, seeing that old woman's house made me want to go home and clean up my own house, clearing out the clutter and purging things that I had been holding onto "just in case".