Putting out Fires

I had a crap ass day today.  I’m still unhappy with  my job.  My working conditions have gotten to be almost unbareable.  The program management always insists on calling me after the time I’m to have already been home just to yell at me.  And to boot it was pouring out when I finally left work, and I had no umbrella for the 1/2 mile jaunt to my car. 

I knew that seeing Ryan would cheer me up, so I dropped by the station.  The guys are so sweet to me, and its really a boost just to be there around all these guys who so obviously love their jobs.  I make sure to never over-stay my welcome, and to always show up with treats.

I was sitting with Ryan in the lounge when a call kicked out.  As I was leaving, the captain, knowing that as a wife new to this life I would be curious, invited me along.  That’s the second time in a week!  It is just so surreal sitting backwards in the engine and looking over to see my husband doing his job. 

The call was for an elderly gentleman who dispatch seemed to think fell in the laundry room.  Sounded benign, so I figured it would be alright for me to tag along.  When we got to the house, however, an entirely different scene met us.  The 90 year-old man’s wife with Alzheimer’s had found her husband lying in a pool of blood; with a gun.  The neighbors had called 911, and as I stood outside the house, the distraut woman from across the street was putting it all together.  She’d wondered why he had come to her house a half hour before with a box and instructed her, frantically, to give the box to his son when he came to get it. 

This man, it turns out, was married to the love of his life who had died of Alzheimer’s 6 years before.  When he found a second chance at love and marriage, this wife developed Alzheimer’s too. 

As I sat in the fire truck in the freezing rain watching the scene unfold, I thought that it looked just like a scene from the 6 o’clock news, but this was not a story that would interest people.  Just a sad, old man at the end of his life anyway.  But what of his wife, who was too confused to understand that she had no one left to take care of her.  And what of the son, who did indeed show up while the coroner was contemplating how to remove the bloody body.  And what of the firefighters who had to deal with the fact that they couldn’t save yet another one. 

On the way back to the station I looked over and saw that despite having to see horrible things like this on a daily basis, it had affected my husband.  It had affected them all, which made me glad that they haven’t become too desensitized with all they’ve seen.  As they joked about the dumb police officer with the retainer in his mouth who’d given them a problem at the scene, I realized that this defense mechanism is the only thing that keeps them going to the scenes where there’s no hope.  Suddenly my job doesn’t seem so bad after all.