Page 25 of In Sheets of Rain

“You should do it,” he said, rolling over to go to sleep. “You never know when you might need to hide in there.”

* * *

Iwent to a choking the next day. We were stood down before we got there.

Another life saved? But not by us.

The next callout was an R4. Motorbike versus truck. The biker was dead.

Too little. Too late.

The job after that was a medical alarm callout.

Fallen, no fractures. Put back to bed.

I ate on the way to a collapse; muesli bar and bottled water.

The collapse was cardiac related. Chronic not acute.

We transported the patient to hospital and then responded to a child birth.

The baby was a boy. There was more blood than I had thought there should be at a birth.

The midwife yelled at us because we didn’t carry neonatal scales in the truck and she’d forgotten hers.

We made the station afterwards. Restocked and then got a Priority One call.

Industrial accident. Crushed hand. He’d lose it.

We hadn’t even cleared the hospital’s ambulance bay before we were assigned an R6. Diabetic collapse. I gave her glucagon. She woke up and ate a cheese sandwich.

We covered New Lynn for a while because all their trucks were on the Shore. Bruises and cuts from a brawl. Chest pains and diarrhoea. A broken neck of femur.

Too old. Too worn. Too much.

We drove out to Piha, Priority Two. Fifty kilometres that felt like a breeze compared to the first half of our shift in the heart of the city.

We called in the helicopter for that one. Back pain with neurological deficit.

Surfing and sharp rocks don’t mix.

We picked up a hospital transfer from Waitakere to take back into the city. The patient slept. We didn’t.

Rush hour started at four.

We didn’t stop until seven.

I walked into Ted’s office before I left the station and asked for a secondment to Comms.

He took one look at me and nodded.

I had four days off and then I would be safe, I thought.

I didn’t know how wrong I could be.