What does fifteen minutes mean to you? To me, it’s a short walk with Jenni or the edgy, flinching time I endure, while sharp picks and mirrors and a fistful of rubberized fingers examine my mouth.
To a heart attack it’s pay dirt; to a stroke it’s a killing; to an overdose it’s long enough; it’s 25% of your critical hour.
It was the way he answered the phone and repeated “nauseous” that prompted my intervention and a feeble attempt at reassurance, “I’ll call 9-1-1,” which began a 15-minute byzantine pursuit through a labyrinth of indifference, ignorance, misinformation, unyielding tenacity, irrationality, and finally the grossly delayed ringing of the fire department serving my brother‘s address.
In this age of instantaneous access to millions and millions of useless and the occasional entertaining tidbit of useless information, we assume that a federal infrastructure would be installed and activated and by dialing three simple digits you would be transferred to the emergency department serving your father’s address.
But there isn’t. Instead you’re passed along with great indifference until, smartphone in hand, you’re barely capable of performing search after search of increasingly familiar street names and coverage maps and administrative offices which you call in desperation and quickly evaporating hope.
Fifteen minutes while your brother or sister or father or mother follow your misguided instructions based on years of same-city-9-1-1-calls. Who would ever think that soliciting an emergency service would be impossible. Impossible? Really? Impossible, while your brother or sister or mother or father sits alone in their home slowly dying.
Without question, the federal government should appropriate whatever amount of money it will cost to rebuild a one-city call center into a network of transferable calls to the exact city where emergency help is needed. Please, spend less of our money on bombs which kill scores of innocent people in faraway countries and use it here at home for emergency call-centers purposefully designed to assure the caller that first responders are on route to your brother or sister or mother or father’s house to save their lives.
Related articles
- Emergency in the 911 call center (dvidshub.net)
- RUMC Emergency Department’s Major Changes Aim To Improve Urgent Care (statenisland.ny1.com)
- Working for faster response times in Davidson County (myfox8.com)
I’ve struggled for months with a question: How do I accomplish, with 
and sadness and exhaustion and anger were released like 
which had been, until age three a common, wanton and guiltless activity. But when suggestion turned to strong-arm prosecution and innocence was culled from a mystery called maturity, a cunning classification (or separation) alienated our equality. Best and Worst were ambitiously introduced as lauded and noble “Big Boys” or castigated and ignoble “Potty-Pantsed!” And from there, with the best of societal intentions at heart, the selflessness of innocence devolved to extinction.
innocence aged to pity? A bystander-turned-victim of life’s hit-and-run? An impossible decision to gamble with heart, lungs, gravity, and the aging breakdown of culverts installed fifty-five years ago?
isolated, and bête noir) leisurely roll to a stop at a red light. Her continental bearing and hardly-subtle style seduced me at once; her polish was ablaze and yet I was smitten and took a step toward her admitting my daily longing and nightly lust for one just like her. As I daydreamed the light changed and off she went like horses out of the gate; I dashed after her but my pursuit was fruitless when she suddenly growled and hesitated, and then she divinely disappeared as capriciously as a shooting star.
my reach; she’d look silly in my hometown, not 
comb-overed, remote, and little known of uncles looking to dump their waning, wooded, wagons onto culturally clueless yet utterly anxious sons of far-flung and holiday-sighted siblings or sibling-in-laws to make room in their attached garage for every middle-aged man’s nocturnal emission: the 
finally after almost forty years of waiting I walked straight into the dealers showroom, pointed at the loaded burnt orange rag top, whipped out thirty-three, one thousand dollar bills said, “Give her a nice wash will ya’? I don’t want to bring home a dirty girl!”
Heartache . . .
mourning I may have expressed. I’m his representative and to an ignorant outside world he hasn’t really disappeared behind the safety of managed care, but has grown taller by five inches.
