There are calls on the ambulance that stick with you. “My Ambulance Education” chronicles many of the calls that stuck with me. One memory that sticks with me was not one of my calls but rather a call of a colleague. Ken was a young paramedic and my partner for the day. I arrived for work and he is getting his gear together. Ken informs me that we needed to go to the hospital to follow up on a patient he had had on a previous shift.

Ken said it was a glorious hazy and hot summer day when he and his partner were called to a “swimming hole” for a ‘man down.’ Upon arrival they see a young couple sitting on the shore with the guy resting his head on the girl’s lap. She is stroking his hair talking to him quietly. As Ken tells me this I wonder why he took note of the scene’s background as opposed to getting on with the call.

It soon becomes apparent that the guy was the call. The couple were in their late teens and had been swimming enjoying the great day. Carl, the boyfriend, dove in, hit his head on the bottom and surfaced flailing with his arms, face down in the water. The girlfriend Tonya, with the help of another guy, pulled Carl from the water. They laid Carl’s head on Tonya’s lap as the other guy went for help.

Ken said as soon as he realized he had a possible broken neck victim he exclaimed, “Oh no, you’ve flexed his neck” and tried to pull traction and monitor vitals. Tonya must have been mortified and Carl scared because both became ghostly white realizing that what they had done might have made things worse. Ken and I both knew that with a possible broken neck, such as with Carl, it is best to keep the neck still and straight so that the spinal cord stays in position. Carl’s head was flexed as it rested on his girlfriend’s lap.

According to Ken, Tonya became inconsolable and Carl, largely unable to move, tried to verbally console her. The scene must have been a mess.

Ken paused, shook his head and said to me,

“18 f***ing years old and paralyzed for life.”

Ken also knew that he made the whole tragic event more terrible by inadvertently implying that they had made the injury worse when they put Carl’s head in her lap. It was likely a reflex exclamation from pure emotion on Ken’s part, but the words were said and the damage done. I fully realize that clinically Ken did everything right. But in Ken’s mind, when he blurted out the admonishment about flexing Carl’s neck, he caused unintentional grief to all concerned.

Ken and I went to the hospital and he looked up the details on Carl. The prognosis was bad. Carl was paralyzed with minimal use of his hands from fractures to the fourth and fifth cervical spine vertebrae. There was little to no hope for a normal life and Tonya had not been allowed to visit him because his parents and family must have felt it was her fault. Ken felt terrible and I wondered if he would want to go visit Carl. To my knowledge he did not visit Carl and we do not know how things turned out for Tonya. It was a tragic call that forever changed multiple lives.

Even though I was not on that call, it has stuck with me all these years.