The bathroom is about the size of a closet. I’m standing in a very awkward wide stance, straddling the toilet, while Lisa is crammed against the other wall, beside me. We just finished trying, and failing, to lift Brett off the floor for the third time with help from the other two aides, and now the four of us are taking a moment to rest, and figure out a plan.
Somehow we have to get a three-hundred pound man off the floor of his bathroom, back into his room and the brown recliner where he normally sleeps.
There are voices all around me, but for a moment all I can think about is heat. The air in this room is warm and sluggish. My face feels like it is raining sweat. My glasses keep sliding down my nose so often I find myself taking them off and staring into a multi-colored blur about as often as I wear them.
“He’s not getting up. He just going to lay there all night.”
“Brett, you have to use your legs.”
“Brett, here. Put your hands up here.”
“Hold onto the walker, Brett.”
“Well, I don’t know what we’re gonna do if we can’t get him up.”
“He too heavy.”
I ignore the sensation that my face is a waterfall long enough to think of ways we can get Brett out of the bathroom. Right now he’s about half-in, half-out, and there is enough room for him to lie flat on his back. I think about some of the techniques I learned in EMS, some of the awkward situations I found myself in back then. I ask if there’s a backboard. No one knows. Some of us were hired in from an agency, while some, like myself, were just hired in. But the thing in common for all of us is that we were just thrown into the mix, left to figure things out on our own. You can’t really orientate when there is often no one else around.
“What about a sling? We could put a sling under him and drag him out there,” I say, nodding past the two aides in the doorway, at the room.
Maybe it’s a dumb idea. I don’t know. But one of the aides leaves for the linen room and returns with a Hoyer sling. I drape it around Brett’s shoulders like a cape and wait for him to lie down. Somewhere in the chaos of voices, and alternate plans, and exhausted dismay, and hard orders for Brett to do this, do that, the sling is never used. Lisa tells one of the aides to wrap a second gait belt around his knees. This is how we eventually drag him out of the bathroom.
From there it is another several tries before we manage to lift Brett high enough to scoop a wheelchair under him. From the beginning he hasn’t really cooperated. He is like a giant rag doll. His head lolls left and right. We try to keep his arms and legs from bending at silly, cartoonish angles, but they still sometimes do.
When we leave Brett’s room, after nearly a half-hour, he is in his recliner again. Slouched, but as high up in the chair as the four of us could position him. I return to C hall, relieved to be out of the sauna of Brett’s room, moving again where the air feels lighter, cooler. But it isn’t long, maybe fifteen minutes, before a voice out in the hall calls me back to help Brett off the floor again.
The position of Brett’s body looks the same as when I first saw him in the bathroom. Curled into a forward slump. The purple span of his huge, round back. His head pushed off to the side, the right side of his face pasted to the floor so only his left eye flashes around at the ceiling, and us. For a time, I am left alone with him. Lisa is next door, in the tiny alcove that functions as the hall’s nurse station, on the phone with an ambulance service.
I kneel and wrap a gait belt around Brett’s waist, pull it as tight as possible. I have him sitting upright, his right leg unkinked, when the other aides arrive. There is no hurry to do anything, so for a time we stand around, arms akimbo, shifting one foot to the other, rubbing the sweat from our foreheads. We discuss plans again, wait for Lisa to get off the phone. We’re all kind of swinging between decisions, the most tired among us saying she’s not going to lift him again, that he can just lie there on the floor until day shift arrives in a couple of hours, and wondering what to do with him. I’m so flustered from the last effort that my brain feels a little dim, like the lights have been turned off. I’m just a couple of hands and some muscle, ready to go along with anything. The other aide, a very young, very pretty girl who has been running all night, who I can hear from the urgency in her voice has gotten kind of worked up, frustrated, over the past hour with Brett and these falls, suggests we just keep him on the floor. “If we put him in his recliner and he falls out again, all we’re doing is making things worse. It’s actually better if we just keep him on the floor for the rest of the night.”
I nod along to her idea, quietly caught in some kind of ongoing, mental tug-of-war. I know it is the best, smartest choice for Brett. I also know it would look really bad.
“Get some pillows and a blanket,” someone who is not me says.
When the EMTs arrive, a half-hour later, Lisa calls me to Brett’s room a third time to help. There isn’t much to do, though, once I arrive. Four young men in dark clothes and combat boots are already looming over Brett like thunderheads, about to backboard him. They work quietly, efficiently. It seems a little odd to see four of them, knowing there are usually only two, the tech and paramedic in charge, per ambulance. Lisa might have sounded too flustered on the phone, exaggerated Brett’s weight. The call dispatched as a lift-assist, two rigs idling outside in the parking lot.
After awhile my attention turns to one EMT in particular. He seems new, but it’s only his very thin frame, the way his shirt droops, that makes me think so. His bowl chest, thin arms peeking out of the sleeves. When Brett is finally lifted onto the gurney, he is quiet, keeps his head bowed as he buckles the restraints.
When I was you, I think. When I was you I was so new I rode third person for a month. The paramedic said my name with a sneer. We were dispatched to homes like this in the dead of night, and we stormed in wearing the same scuffed boots, and fixed the problems other people could not. My stomach churning, feeling unprepared but ready for anything. When I regarded an aide it was with the prefix “just,” because I didn’t know any better. And now I’m here, watching you, on the other side.
