911: A look from street side

The Boston Herald

She wouldn't let them into her house. She stood on her dilapidated porch, in the middle of a well-kept neighborhood, her back to the door and insisted that she was fine, that they could go, and that she was going nowhere.

She was 82. She lived alone on the first floor of a house she'd bought years ago. Dirt was caked in the lines of her creviced face. Her V-neck white sweater was filthy. Her skirt was filthy. Her feet were swollen to twice normal size, the straps of her sandals cut to accommodate them. She'd tied a plastic bag around her right sandal to keep it from falling off.

"I never called 911," she said. "I have no need for 911. You can see I'm not unconscious on the floor. You can see I'm perfectly fine. Just go," she told police and EMTs who responded to the call.

But she wasn't fine. Flies swarmed around the porch. They smelled the trash inside the house and beat against the locked windows. They fed on the old cans of cat food littering the floor. They nested in the ancient chairs upholstered with trash bags.

She wanted nothing from anyone, the woman said. She could take care of herself. She refused to go to the hospital. She refused to have the EMTs even look at her feet.

Five EMTs talked to her. But the woman remained adamant. "I don't need you. Go away," she said.

They didn't go away. They couldn't take her to a hospital, they couldn't even touch her, without her permission. So they just kept talking. Steve Antonino, a paramedic, said, "How about if I just look at your feet and clean them and bandage them right here?" And the woman said no, but less fiercely, so he asked again, and she nodded and he took antiseptic and gauze out of his bag and knelt on the urine-stained porch and sat her down in a portable chair and dressed her feet.

Perhaps it was the tenderness of the paramedics that wore her down.

"No one has ever done anything for me without getting paid for it," she said. "No one."

Rich Serino, superintendent of Boston's Emergency Medical Services, reasoned with her.

"We know you want to stay independent, but you need your feet to do that," he said. "We don't want to take you away from your house. We just want to take you to the hospital so you can get your feet fixed, so you can come back here and continue to be independent."

She wavered a little more. "Your feet must hurt. It must hurt for you to walk. It must hurt for you to do anything," he said.

Her eyes filled.

"Will you let us take you to the hospital?"

"Yes," she said.

Gently, they strapped her in the chair and carried her down the steps and drove her to Boston Medical Center. Carefully, they explained the situation to a doctor and a nurse so that social services could be notified.

It was 7 o'clock Tuesday evening and this was the EMTs' 199th call of the day.

Far too many of the calls, on this the beginning of of school vacation, involved kids and bikes and kids and cars and people passing out. There had been a 1 p.m. press conference that day.

"Menino, Public Safety, Health officials deliver July 4th holiday safety, injury prevention message," the headline said. Bike helmets had been given away and prescriptions for helmets that allowed parents to buy them for just $ 5 at the Boston Medical Center gift shop as well as sundry reminders about how to cross a street safely and how not to dehydrate in the summer.

But all over town, people were riding without helmets and walking against lights and passing out and falling down. An 8-year-old had fallen over the handle bars of her bike. A 9-year-old, a 7-year-old, an 11-year-old and a teenager had been hit by cars. Not one of them had been wearing a helmet.

A child was hit while walking on the street. Another was hit crossing the street. A middle aged woman was critically injured crossing a street.

There were 306 calls before the day was over. And on goes all day, all night, every day, every night all over the city.