The Dark Side of Cambridge: A Night With Rescue

IT WAS a busy night for the Rescue Co. Before the five men in the crew even had an opportunity to change into their working uniforms they had to make two medical runs--a broken ankle and a seizure.

The Rescue Co. is a special part of the Cambridge Fire Department. It covers the whole city instead of a certain area like the engine and ladder companies, and it responds to a wide variety of calls in addition to fires. The men on Rescue are regular firefighters who have emergency medical technician (EMT) training and have volunteered for Rescue duty.

At a fire, the company's job is to remove people from danger, provide medical attention, and then assist the other companies in fighting the fire. Most of the crew's time, however, is not taken up by fires but by stills (when people call Fire Alarm instead of pulling a fire box in the street), which usually involve some sort of medical emergency. Thus the Rescue company is far busier than any other company in the city, averaging close to 5000 runs a year.

The men on duty that night were Lt. John O'Donoghue, Bob McCleery, John (Spike) Lawless, Fred (Bunky) Bokuniewicz, and Fred Ikels. They managed to make it through supper without being interrupted, but around 9 p.m. the calls started coming in fast.

First, the company, in the 1969 Mack heavy duty rescue truck, was called to a home in East Cambridge on a report that a woman was injured. Upon arrival the activity became intense--going into the house, down the stairs to the basement with the dirt floor, the one bare bulb, the police with flashlights and the bloody bodies.

While the police tried to piece together what had happened, Rescue went to work. It seemed to be an attempted murder, and then an attempted suicide. A man had apparently attacked his ex-wife with a hammer, beating her severely, and then had drunk something to kill himself. She was sprawled in the center of the floor, her head, chest, arms and legs covered with lacerations and bruises. He had collapsed a few feet away. Both were unconscious but still alive.

Rescue did preliminary first aid on the spot, and Lt. O'Donoghue collected the relevant information on the incident that he would later relay to the staff in the emergency room at Cambridge City Hospital. They carefully lifted the two people into special chairs and carried them out to the truck. On the way to the hospital they administered oxygen and tried to rouse the man so that they could find out what he drank. In the emergency room they transferred the two over to the waiting doctors and nurses.

The whole episode had taken less than an hour. On the way back to the firehouse the men talked about the problems that cause such incidents, and they speculated about how busy the rest of the night would be.

The lieutenant said that action has a way of coming all at once. Fires, especially, tend to come in bunches. One group in a company seems to get all the fires--it will get a three-alarm, have all the fires for a few weeks and then get another three-alarm to end the cycle. He said that it probably was not statistically true but it always seemed to happen that way.

THERE ALSO SEEMS to be more trouble on nights with full moons, for that is when all the strange people in the city come out. Lt. O'Donoghue said that if he goes home and tells his wife that he had a terrible night, she will go look at the calendar and say, "Well, what did you expect? There's a full moon. You should have called in sick."

Back in the firehouse they had just settled down with some cups of coffee when the intercom blared out "Attention. Rescue only. Rescue going out." The bells in the house began to ring the signal for Rescue, one short followed by one long, and the guys hit the poles and climbed in the truck.

They went to the Holiday Inn on Mass Ave where they found a man who was lying in the lobby with what seemed to be severe stomach pains. They transported him to Cambridge Hospital, and after giving him to the staff there they sat for a few moments in a little waiting room off of the emergency ward and joked about the case.

Apparently the guy was a faker. Bob knew that he had been acting by the exaggerated way he had passed out in the truck and by the way he had forcibly held his eyes shut. Spike said that it was disturbing how many people they get who fake illness, most of whom just seem to be lonely and want some attention.

There is really nothing Rescue can do about such cases except treat the persons as if something was actually wrong, since they can not take chances. Spike said that there is one guy who knows how to perfectly mimic the symptoms of a heart attack. Between the four groups in the Rescue Co. they end up picking him up every couple of months like a regular customer. What annoys the men is that such people tie up the truck and thus could prevent them from making it to someone who really needs them.

Before they made it back to the station they received a call on the radio. It was a man with heart trouble, and it was no act this time. The man was in bad shape when Rescue arrived, and he started to go completely on the truck. They began to furiously apply cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and managed to keep him going until they reached Mt. Auburn Hospital. Bob maintained the rhythmic pumping of the man's chest all the way into the trauma room, where an emergency team waited with equipment to try and shock the heart back into its normal pattern.

When Bob came out of the room he was dripping with sweat. He said that it was cases like this that illustrate the necessity of a unit like the Rescue Co. A regular ambulance crew has only two people and cannot properly perform CPR on the way to the hospital.

Later, however, the guys learned that, although they had done a good job in getting the man to the hospital alive, he had not made it. He had a pacemaker and had been living on borrowed time.

Around midnight, just as the men were about to go to sleep, they were called to the scene of an auto accident in Central Square. Two cars were involved, but only one person was hurt, a woman with a serious head injury. She had no memory of what had transpired just prior to the accident, and there was an amazing scene in the back of the truck on the way to the hospital as she frantically asked her husband what had happened. She was desperate to know and kept saying "tell me, tell me," and her husband held her hand and tried to re-create the previous couple of hours--the restaurant, the chowder, the schrod, the accident, everything was going to be all right. . .

When they finally got back to the firehouse, the guys immediately went to sleep in the big dormitory on the second floor. They say that they can never sleep as well at the firehouse as they can at home. Part of you is always awake, waiting, listening for the alarm.

Around 6 a.m. the aerial tower unit went out on a false alarm, but for the Rescue Co. the city was peaceful the rest of the night.