Preface
Kate Worthington
According to Webster’s Dictionary, destiny is defined as a predetermined course of events often held to be an irresistible power. I have often wondered if a person’s life follows a path that is laid out long before he or she ever takes a first step. Or are we in control of what happens to us?
My name is Kate Worthington and I am a paramedic. I’ve seen some dramatic events in my life. I’ve watched people fight to survive, with impressive fortitude, and I’ve watched others surrender to death peacefully without fear of what lay beyond. Perhaps they could see what waited for them on the other side. Perhaps they knew it was beautiful.
Or perhaps they simply had no notion that they were in any danger to begin with, and simply allowed themselves to be carried along by fate.
I’ve also seen people come back from the dead, in more ways than one, and I wonder if they returned because there was some unfinished business to attend to. Maybe they still had lessons to learn.
I certainly have more than a few lessons to learn, but I do know one thing: Sometimes life is cruel, and at times it can seem rather pointless and tragic. But occasionally and surprisingly, certain hardships can lead us down a new path we never could have imagined.
And maybe that new path – that unexpected set of changed circumstances – was our destiny all along.
Chapter One
I’m sure if you look back, you are able to pinpoint specific events in your life that changed you forever. For me, one of those events occurred on a country road in New Hampshire, in the frigid cold of a mid-February afternoon in 2007, when I watched a scuba diver pull a dead woman from the bottom of a frozen lake.
“What happened?” I asked the cop when I stepped out of the ambulance and felt the heel of my boot slip on a patch of black ice. “Whoa.” I grabbed hold of the side mirror to steady myself.
“The driver swerved to avoid hitting a deer,” he replied, blowing into his hands and rubbing them together to warm them. “Must have hit the brakes too hard. According to witnesses, the vehicle did a one-eighty, then rolled down the embankment. Landed upside down on the ice and stayed there for a minute or two before the ice broke. Then... down she went.”
There were a few cars parked on the side of the road with their hazard lights blinking. It was the usual scene. Spectators stood around, watching the show. Cop cars were positioned with red and blue lights flashing, and other officers in neon yellow vests waved at oncoming cars, motioning for everyone to move along.
“How long has the vehicle been underwater?” I asked, not knowing if it was a single driver or an entire family with kids. Heaven forbid.
“About twenty minutes,” the cop said. “Lucky thing there was a car following behind. Saw the whole thing and called it in.”
“I don’t know if I’d call any of this lucky,” I said. “How did you get a diver down here so fast?”
“Another stroke of luck,” the cop replied. “He’s a volunteer with search and rescue, and conveniently, he lives right there.” He pointed at a small lakeside bungalow.
“I suppose that is lucky.”
“Yeah, though I’m not sure how much good it’ll do. Twenty minutes under water. I’m not holding out much hope.”
I strode closer to the edge of the road to get a better view just as the scuba diver re-surfaced. He bobbed like a cork out of a gaping black hole in the ice.
In his arms, he held the limp body of a woman.
Chapter Two
I became a paramedic because I was fascinated by emergency medicine. This obsession began when I was sixteen. How exhilarating to imagine that I could actually save a life. I did briefly consider going to medical school, but didn’t feel I had the grades.
Not that it doesn’t take brains to be a paramedic. I studied hard to get through the program. On top of that, it takes a certain type of person to keep a cool head in out-of-control situations when people are covered in blood.
I’m proud of my skills. I’m also proud of the fact that I graduated from high school at all, when someone else in my situation might never have made it. I’ll explain more about that later, but for now, let’s focus on the dead woman.
***
As soon as the rescue team reached the snow-covered shoreline and set the body down, I checked for a pulse. There wasn’t one.
“Hurry,” I said. “We have to get her out of here.”
I climbed up the embankment, reaching hand over hand, slipping on snow-covered rocks, while the rescue team followed behind me, awkwardly hoisting the gurney. They reached the road at last and extended the wheels. My partner, Bill, bagged and masked the woman while I began chest compressions, which I performed while walking alongside the rolling gurney as we wheeled her to the ambulance.
Bill always did the driving. He enjoyed blasting the horn, running traffic lights, and I’m pretty sure he entered this line of work because he loved the wail of the siren. Me... I always reminded him to slow down and drive with care. All I wanted was to keep my patients safe and tell them everything was going to be okay.
I knew this woman couldn’t hear me, but when we slid her into the back of the ambulance and the doors slammed shut, I spoke the words to her regardless. “Everything’s going to be okay,” I said. Habit I guess.
“Buckled in?” Bill asked over his shoulder as he turned the key in the ignition. He was joking of course, because I had work to do in the back. I was busy putting the leads on and calling ahead to the hospital.
When I had the doctor on the line, I calmly and quickly explained the situation while looking down at the woman’s face behind the oxygen mask. She was about my age, mid- to late-thirties, with dark auburn hair. Some of the ends were white with frost. She was a sickly blue-gray color, like a cadaver in a morgue, but also severely hypothermic. That observation gave me hope.
“What’s her temperature?” the doc asked me.
I reached into my bag for the digital thermometer. “Eighty-one degrees. And she’s soaking wet.”
He paused, but only for a second, then began spouting off instructions. “Get her clothes off right away and cover her with a heating blanket. Tell your driver to crank up the heat in the ambulance as high as it will go. Start warm IV fluids. Stick the IV bags down your own shirt if you have to. The goal is to get her warm, even if you can only raise her temperature a few degrees. Don’t defibrillate. Not yet. Focus on warming her up to at least eighty-six, then start CPR. We’ll be waiting for you outside the ER doors.”
I proceeded to remove the patient’s wet clothes, then I wrapped her in an electric heating blanket and stuffed the IV bags down my shirt like the doctor suggested.
“Where’s a microwave when you need one?” I said to Bill, shocked by the chilly bag against my skin. “Ooh, that’s cold.”
I couldn’t imagine what it had been like for this poor woman, when gallons of ice water came pouring into her car.
I used my stethoscope to check for a heartbeat and looked at her face again. Would we be able to revive her? I wondered. And if we did, would she ever be the same?
“How you doing back there?” Bill asked as he took a hard right turn. I fell forward slightly, then tucked the blanket around the woman a little more tightly.
“We’re okay. Do you have the heat up as high as it’ll go?”
“Yeah, but do you really think there’s any hope? She was down there a long time.”
“She’s not dead until she’s warm and dead,” I replied, taking her temperature again. Eighty-three degrees.
“Realistically, how often do they come back without any brain damage?” Bill asked.
“I don’t know the stats, but I’ve seen it happen. When I was a kid, my dad took our dog hunting for rabbits one winter and accidentally shot her.”
“Geez,” Bill said.
“Dad didn’t know that he shot her. He thought she ran off after something, then he found her in the snow after a couple of hours. I don’t know how long she was dead, but we all got the shock of our lives when she woke up after my dad brought her home and laid her down by the woodstove.”
“Are you sure she was really dead?”
“Yeah, a hundred percent sure. My head was resting on her chest. Maybe it was my body heat that brought her back.”
“Sounds like a miracle to me.”
I used my stethoscope to listen for a heartbeat again, but still, there was nothing.
“I don’t believe in miracles,” I said. “It’s just science. No different from a frozen dinner that sits in the freezer for six months, then tastes great after five minutes in the microwave.”
It was getting warm in the ambulance. I had to unbutton my jacket and shrug out of it. “How much further?” I asked Bill.
“We’re five minutes away.” He slammed on the brakes and laid on the horn. “Pull over you idiot!” Then he swerved and hit the gas.
I checked the woman’s temperature again. It was eighty-six degrees, so I began CPR.
Chapter Three
The ambulance doors flew open. I was dripping with sweat. Doctors and nurses surrounded us. Within moments, the woman was wheeled into the trauma room and the doctor yelled, “Clear!”
Bill and I backed out at that point, and I exhaled sharply, knowing it would take some time for my adrenaline to slow down. I was wired.
While I went to the tech room to type up my report, Bill offered to fetch me a cup of coffee, but I asked for a cold bottle of Gatorade instead because I felt like I’d just pumped iron in a sauna.
***
By the time I finished my report, our shift was at an end, but I made sure to check on the woman before I left. “Did they get her back?” I asked the clerk at the nurse’s station.
“Yeah, they did. I was surprised because she was down for so long, but Dr. Newman just wouldn’t give up. He kept checking her temperature and shocking her, then lo and behold, the heart monitor started beeping. You didn’t hear everybody cheering?”
“No.”
“Well, there were a few whoops and hollers. It really makes you think. Good job, by the way.”
I moved behind the desk to toss my empty Gatorade bottle into the recycling bin, then went to the trauma room. It was empty. They must have taken the woman upstairs.
“Did she say anything when she came to?” I asked, because I couldn’t seem to forget the blue pallor of her skin in my ambulance. It was like undressing a corpse. Which I suppose... she was at the time.
“No,” the clerk replied, “’cause she didn’t actually wake up. She’s in a coma. They took her to ICU about ten minutes ago.”
The hope and satisfaction I felt was immediately curtailed.
Maybe there was nothing to celebrate after all. Maybe it was just a matter of time before someone would have to pull a plug.
I wondered about her family. Did she have a husband? Children?
As I walked out of the hospital, a sudden wave of exhaustion washed over me. It’s not easy to do chest compressions for extended periods of time, and I’d really wanted to bring this woman back. There were moments in the ambulance when I could almost hear her pleading with me to stay hopeful. Don’t... give... up.
I unlocked my car and climbed into the driver’s seat, then sat for a moment with my hands on the steering wheel. Staring straight ahead, I wondered if that voice in my head had less to do with saving that woman’s life, and more to do with saving my own.
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