Sunday, October 23, 2011

Never Wake a Sleeping Bear

One of my favorite things about being a fireman is dealing with drunk people. Just the pure comic value makes it worth waking up at 4:00 in the morning. For some reason on this part of town we get an abnormal amount of drunks passing out behind the wheel of their car at stoplights which most of the time results in them going to jail versus the hospital. Well my last occurrence with a drunk didn't come in at the normal 2-5am hour but right after we started our shift. It was around 7am when my engine along with our ambulance were dispatched to an unconscious person on the side of the road. Like any morning call we are wide awake and ready for the day so we get out of the station pretty quick, but before our ambulance who was about a minute behind us for some reason.

We got to the neighborhood relativity fast and as we pull up, see a man passed out on his face laying near a tree. Well we walk up and "carefully" shake him a little until he starts coming to until in the blink of an eye, he lunges forward and goes for the legs of the guy closest to him. He's grabbing and punching the firefighter's legs like a madman so I force him back to the ground. I've seen enough of episodes of Cops so I put my knee in his chest with most of my weight on it to hold him down while the other guys came and held his arms. About that time, one of the guys got on the radio and asked for the cops which should have already been on the way but we needed them to hurry before this guy got out of hand. Well in the midst of all that, this guy somehow squirms around enough to become loose of my knee and tries to fight again. I don't know where he thought he was going but I grabbed the back of his neck and forced him face down in the ground while another guy, I shit you not, leaps through the air like a soaring eagle and lands on the patient's back. I'm sure if you were standing there watching it that it would have looked like a Hollywood movie. It all happened in slow motion and I can still see the firefighter in mid flight.

Now I want to make it clear for you "Brutality Nazis" out there that we are allowed to subdue patients if we feel our safety is in jeopardy. Being that this guy was trying to fight us, we had every right to restrain him until the cops arrived. Here is a video of something similar I found on the internet.


After we got this guy under control, dispatch calls us back to find out what was going on. I guess they could hear the commotion in the background as we called for the police.

Dispatch: "Engine XX is your patient violent?"
Us: "NOT ANYMORE!!"
Dispatch: "Do you still need law enforcement at your location?"
Us: "THAT WOULD BE NICE"

No longer than a minute later, the dumbest cop on the face of the earth shows up. (For the record I love cops, and have many friends who are police officers but some are just absolutely stupid. Don't worry we have firemen like that too). This cop gets out of the car, sees us and gives us a big ol' good to see ya smile while casually walking up to where we are. No urgency or care in the world , it's not like we were actively restraining someone or anything. The cop makes his way over and asks what's going on so we tell him the story, all while still holding the guy down mind you. He grabs his handcuffs and holds them out in front of him like he expected us to put them on the guy. We ended up calming the patient down by explaining to him that we were there to help. At that point, I think he finally realized what was going on and snapped out of his little angry mode. He agreed to not cause anymore problems so we let him up and the cop tells him to walk over to the police car. We watch as he stumbles away with the cop not even watching but it wasn't really our problem anymore so we went back in service. 

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