Trial by Fire
Kristoffer Garlitz has a collection of intense first day stories. There was his first day in the Army, training to become a medic. The first day of his deployment to Afghanistan. Perhaps his most tragic story is his first day as an emergency medical technician (EMT) for a fire department.
It was the first week of May 2015. Kris began his 24-hour shift as an EMT for Camas-Washougal fire department. As a volunteer, he had the option of only working 12 hours, but he wanted to work the same shift as the career firefighters.
“There is always a sub-conscious pecking order,” says Kris. He was used to this kind of thing from the Army. A new volunteer, he says, was lowest on the totem pole. To ingratiate himself to his crew, he started off at 7 a.m. doing the chores: he cleaned toilets, mopped, made sure that the ambulance was fully stocked, and even cooked breakfast.
“Eggs. Omelettes are huge and of course, bacon. A bit more bacon than you could possibly eat so they all have heart attacks,” Kris says. He has a kind of morbid sense of humor that a group of firefighters could appreciate.
After the morning chores, the crew moved into the living room. The area they spent most of the day in had a TV and five reclining chairs, assigned by precedence. Kris grabbed a folding chair from the kitchen. A captain stopped by some time between 10 a.m. and noon for a training meeting. He made sure the firefighters knew their blue cards, step-by-step instructions for what to do at a scene. After the meeting, the crew sat around and watched TV, mostly sports like football and NASCAR.
Around seven that night, Kris first heard the voice of what he calls “the lady in the ceiling,” an automated loudspeaker that accompanies every alarm. She tells the crew where they have to be and what they have to bring. It was a priority one call, the most urgent, and the crew needed to be out the door in less than a minute.
“If I wasn’t ready, for whatever reason, they would leave me behind,” Kris says. “Then, when they got back, I would have to explain where the hell I was.”
It was a medical call only call. The medical crew was one Paramedic and one EMT, both career firefighters, and Kris, the volunteer EMT. They loaded up their blood red ambulance and raced to a high-rise apartment in Vancouver, Wash. The two career guys in front and Kris in the back.
When they arrived, there was a paramedic from the Vancouver Fire Department on the scene. He was treating a 2 year old boy who was having trouble breathing and starting to turn blue.
“You could tell he was nervous because this kid wasn’t breathing,” Kris says of the Vancouver Fire paramedic.
The paramedic had placed an oxygen mask on the child and was administering CPR. The paramedic from Camas-Washougal took over as soon as they arrived. They found out that the parents didn’t want them to use any kind of medication for their son.
“The parents had no idea what was going on,” Kris says.
This didn’t sit well with the paramedic, or Kris. Imagine seeing a child, barely old enough to walk, gasping in agony and the parents don’t want to help him. As they loaded the boy in the ambulance, the paramedic pleaded with the child’s parents to let them at least give him some pain medication.
“The kid was writhing in pain,” Kris says.
The career EMT drove while Kris and the paramedic were in the back with the child and his parents. On the way to the hospital they administered aid to the best of their ability. When they dropped the kid off, at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center, his heartbeat was extremely faint and he was only breathing eight times a minute.
“That baby died that night in the hospital,” Kris says, while he was out on another call. “When you transport, you go to the same hospitals all the time. So you find out what happened through the grapevine.”
This wasn’t the first time Kris treated someone who didn’t make it. Early in 2012, Kris was deployed to Zari, Afghanistan. When a shipping container full of munitions was struck by an artillery round, Kris was one of the medics who helped treat the wounded. Two of the soldiers did not survive.
Kris worked through the summer for the fire department, before moving to Reno to study nursing. Although he doesn’t completely dismiss working as an EMT again, he would much rather progress in the medical field. His dream is that one day will be his first day as a registered nurse anesthetist. As far as he goes, he will never forget his first day at Camas-Washougal fire department, and the little boy.
