"Are you going to the Blue Mass ceremony?" my supervisor asked. "What's that?" I said. The local community Catholic church was honoring EMS, police, and fire with a special mass that would be followed with food, door prizes, and awards. If anything, the free food sounded good. It was a bit more than that from the perspective of our manager, she needed as many of us to attend as possible to represent the ambulance service. EMS is provided by a private ambulance service that serves ten counties in MS, and the county I work in is contractual, a deal that happens to come up for renewal next Spring. There are other ambulance services that will be bidding, they always do. Who gets to take care of people is auctioned to the highest bidder, but what it really amounts to is who gets to collect from all that insurance. Some of the bigger corporate services know full well what this county offers in South MS, mostly Medicare, Medicaid, or none at all. Medicare which is government managed, hasn't increased what their willing to pay for a ambulance run in twenty years, in fact they've made cuts under Obamacare. Now I think it'll pay 300 bucks. In that time period where they have not increased, the expenses incurred by ambulance services has doubled - fuel, worker salaries, equipment, and insurance. MS medicaid is one of the strictest payers of healthcare in the country. Some ambulance corporations have been forced to stop all raises, 401k offers, and cut costs by using sub-standard equipment and cheaper protocol medication interventions. The service I work for is no exception. My truck has over 300,000 miles on it and it shows. We use manual FERNO stretchers that have a high rate of back injuries vs. the new power stretchers that use hydraulics. They are pretty much standard in departments that are adequately funded. Private services, those in which are for profit, like the one I work for, are not adequately funded. The details of which I'm not privy to. How much "the man" is making that owns the company is unknown to me, so I'm asked to deal with the cut backs as best I can. If I don't like it, or raise such a cry, and it's buh-bye. I should mention that many tax-payer funded non-profit services are also feeling budget woes and running deficits, but there are grants from the federal stimulus money filling in the holes. Grants that private services cannot apply for. If I had known civilization was going to be like this at birth, I would've choked myself on my umbilical cord.
So here I was being asked by my immediate manager to play politics and represent this for profit ambulance provider I find myself working for. I can't deny the benefit it has been for me since coming back from Vermont. 48 hrs on/48 hrs off, 72hr on, 48 off, 48 on, 72 off is the best scheduled there is for overtime. The company of course would love to dispense with this overtime generating shift at the earliest convience, but convience is not working out for them. There are not enough paramedics willing to work this kind of shift. Most are intimidated by the hourly rate, which is pretty low competitively; but it has to be because of the massive amount of overtime, and the chance occurrence of no sleep, no bath, and intubating someone under the foggy veil of drowsiness from being up the last thirty hours. The other counties the ambulance service operates have 24/48 hr shifts and the big city it serves has 12 hr shifts, and a special 12 hr pay rate to go with it. The 24 hr pay rate is about half what it is for a 12 hr shift. For instance, I make 14/hr working a 24hr shift vs a 20/hr working a 12 hr one. Overtime pays time and a half. So 14 becomes 21/hr and working a 48/72 shift gifts 88 hrs of 21/hr pay. That's really good money for a doomer like myself, and I have never made that much in the last twenty years doing this job. Granted, my pay rate is much higher than most, because this company pays for experience. So much for every year you have been a paramedic. Believe it or not most ambulance companies don't pay for experience, or if they do it's only if you worked for them all those years. What they are willing to pay for each year is also all very variable. Under this system paramedics are a commodity like the people they help. As a worker we don't like to think about the machine too much, instead choosing to see the job as a gem, a precious resource that gives the opportunity to shake the hand of death and ease the pain that afflicts our neighbor. Few understand us, addicted to drama and death, the macob and gross, blue lights and red lights, the wail of a siren, and the blast from the air horn. We do this from doing this for free to what I make now, we do this for love. Emergency work has some of the greatest numbers of people who will do it for free. FREE! I'm still a volunteer firefighter/medic. Free does not pay the bills though, it doesn't provide a home, food on the table, gas money, insurance, etc, all the vices of civilization. Free pays differently. Free doesn't make you a commodity, it makes you a blessing, it makes you a friend, it makes you a person and not a thing to be exploited by some person in a mansion living up on the hill. Money is essential in this corrupted world we were born into, but bestows nothing beyond what it was intended. Gifting is so much more powerful. We basically know this, but the machine is powerful, and the neuro imprinting well established by the age of 2 that we need money. So I told my manager, "sure, I'll go, and I'll try and get my wife to go." Our family's were invited too. She threw a bone to me, "you'll get 5 pts on your next eval." Whoopie, no one has received a raise in over three years. I was just thinking of the free food, and a chance to mingle with the neighborhood. These people I would meet tonight would be the zombies roaming the landscape tomorrow. It might help in my decision on who to take out on a zombie raid, and who to share my navel oranges with, or it might give me some impression on how quickly I would die.
My wife has social anxiety disorder, SAD, and she does not take medication for it. We choose to manage her condition with a firm hand grip and my reassurances. I don't understand the disorder, where it comes from, but only what the medical research says about it. Lack of Serotonin reuptake receptors in the brain and some developmental crisis in youth. Yeah, yeah, it's just a big pain in the ass. She wanted to meet my coworkers, and after two years of being at the company I think only one has ever met her. Plus, since hurricane Isaac and buying a house up here, she needed some local friends to share her passion for gardening, sewing, and scrap booking with. This would be a great opportunity for her. Little did she know what a big production this would turn out to be. The appreciation ceremony was being put on by the Knights of Columbus which was founded by father Michael McGivney in 1882, and named in honor of the navigator Christopher Columbus. Considering what Christopher Columbus did I can hardly see the honor in it, but other than this casual wikipedia search told me I knew very little about the organization except for associations with the local charities. I was raised Catholic and practiced the religion until the age of reason, or maybe it was just a crisis of soul searching, I don't know. I hadn't been to church in 8 years, not since I attended a mass in order to get free rakes, shovels, wheelbarrows, and other much needed tools in the weeks following hurricane Katrina. I think it was the only visible free relief the Catholic church provided for Pearlington in the recovery after Katrina. The richest religion in the world could only manage some yard tools. The Baptist, Presbyterians, Pentacostals, the Amish, etc were in there with huge mega-tent cities dispensing volunteer labor, construction material, food, water, and most importantly evangelical sermons. After helping you with the essentials they'd sneak in the question, "do you know Jesus?" or "have you been saved?" If you're not a Christian this was most uncomfortable given that the same people had done so much for you. It was like all that love had just been spoiled by a motivating mission to earn converts. I think most people just lied, "yes, I know Jesus." I know of Jesus, but I don't believe in all that middle eastern desert cult blood sacrifice stuff in which his blood is needed to appease Jehovah of our sins. My brain is still scarred with all that mumbo jumbo. The Catholics were of the least help, but at least they didn't bother with the evangelizing questions. I'll give them that. If you weren't Catholic, they'd just give you that "repent my son, for you are going to hell" look. A look is much easier to deal with than one that is paired with a direct question.
The ceremony was at St. Charles Catholic Church in Picayune, MS. The church was near the now abandoned old Crosby hospital and where I had pronounced the first person to die in hurricane Isaac. When we arrived a crowd of well known deputies and Picayune police officers were gathered at the front of the church. It was 7 pm, and it was now dark and chilly. Most of my coworkers were mingling with the ambulance gang, and fire/police were doing the same with their respective groups. Humans migrate to those they know the best when in a crowd. It proves we are tribal by nature to me. I enjoyed introducing my pretty wife, the prettiest one there which was obviously very biased, to my manager, my EMT partners, and a few firefighters that I've run interesting calls with. Like the man who died while driving and then drove his car into a thick stand of tree's the other night. My wife was driving back from work and saw me with the firefighters pulling the mans lifeless body out over a palisade of spear like broken tree's and barb wire. The man was my age, 41, and died of a massive heart attack. Shocked him three times while he was still in the car and got nothing that was better than the fibrillatory beat his heart was in when I first hooked him to the ECG monitor. I introduced her to a bald headed black cop that helped me pull two kids from a burning house filled with smoke. He had cut his arm going through the window too. Another cop who was out with us on the guy killed by a fallen tree during Isaac was there. We talked about how scared we were that another tree was going to fall on us when the firefighters were chainsawing the tree in order to confirm the driver was indeed dead. It didn't matter we had rain suits on, the wind was driving the water to the bone that night, and the tree's were like an army of pole ax bearing executioners.
Once it was 7pm sharp, the doors were opened and we were ushered in by departments. EMS lead the way, or just behind the robbed priests wearing microphones. My wife gripped my hand in a death grip and began rotating her fingers in stressful procession digging nails into my knuckles. A line of knights, knights of the Columbus, who were bearing swords raised up to their faces saluted us as we walked up to our pew. They were wearing big Napoleonic type hats, capes, and various metals and symbols of their order. Oh Lord, it was freaking my wife out, and I too felt uncomfortable as a sea of eyes blinked around me. A solo singer and guitarist were singing as the procession came in, and the back walls of the church were lit with a projector showing everyone the lyrics. Fancy, I thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment