Jumping ahead...

I was working a night EMT shift, and Larry was working in the ER. It had been a fairly quiet evening all around. A call came in. Heart attack! Now, all things considered, our training covered most anything that could happen "out there". Once we arrived at the scene, we could handle it, whatever it was. The point being that unlike the days of old, where you would see an ambulance running thru red lights and traffic at breakneck speeds, our training meant that we could get to the scene in a reasonable amount of time and get there safely. The only real exception to that is a heart attack. With a heart attack, time is of the essence. If the heart stops beating, there is but a very short time before irreversible brain damage will begin to take place. So, with a heart attack, we had to get to the scene as soon as possible. That night, there were three of us going on the call...

We were heading up the road, all lights (roof, grill, corners etc) and sirens (hi-lo, yelp and wail) at full blare. We were going up a slight incline on this two lane road. It was dusk, somewhere between 8 and 9 pm. There were perhaps a dozen cars ahead of us, and we knew that they were aware of us because they all had their brake lights on, all had their right turn signals on, and they had all had pulled onto the right hand shoulder to let us go by. As they say, it doesn't get any better than that. As Marion (King, driving that night) was wheeling past the cars, it all seemed safe enough. But I had a feeling that I wanted to hang back, for some reason. As we were approaching the lead car in the group being passed, it made a left turn directly into our path. Since it was on the right hand shoulder with its right turn signal on, we had no warning that it would turn left in front of us. I recall we were going quite fast because of the call.....heart attack. When it pulled into our path, I remember looking at it, thinking "shit, they just pulled in front of us". Because of oncoming traffic and no shoulder available, I remember thinking that we didn't have any place to go, no escape route, and no time to stop. I turned to Bob, on my right, and said something about did he see that car that pulled in front of us? He said yep, he saw it. I then turned to Marion and asked him if he saw it. Yes. I asked if he thought we had time/room to stop, and he said, nope, not a chance. Now, all of this is going on ~after~ the car pulled in front of us. And we're going quite fast. I estimate that from the time the car pulled in front of us, to the time we hit it, was less than a second. So, after the conversation with Marion, I looked back at that car and noticed it was a 1956 ford two door wagon, blue, and in quite nice condition. Noticed its windows were rolled up. Noticed that I could see no rust on it. Turned again to Marion and commented that it seems we were going to hit it. Yup. So I turned again to the car and thought, well maybe I need to brace myself. So, I put my right hand on the dash for a brace. No seat belts used. Not sure if there were any in that ambulance. Hit the car.

Next memory I had was sitting there on the seat. I noticed I was probably still alive. Decided to see how bad I was. I wiggled my toes, feet, ankles, knees etc. Seemed that everything was intact and functional. I sat up (I had been laying back on the seat, with my head on the seat top, facing the roof of the ambulance. All of a sudden, I could not see. I took my hand to brush my hair out of my eyes, and something did not feel right. Instead of hair, I felt something smooth and hard and wet. I was rubbing my hand on my skull. At that point, I figured, Houston, we've got a problem. I was patting my scalp back down when I felt someone grab my shoulder. It was Marion. he asked me if I was ok and I said I thought so. He said I needed to get out of there, but the doors were crushed shut, so I'd have to crawl over the seats and exit out the back. With his help, I was able to get out of the ambulance. Once out, I asked him for some 4 by 4s (basically, bandages that are 4 inches by 4 inches in size), and I more or less bandaged up my head. I remember looking down at myself and saw that I was fairly bloody. Quite sticky. I have very little recollection of how I looked, except that I had lost a fair amount of blood. Turns out, most of it was on the hospital whites (uniform) I was wearing. I remember running thru the crowd that had gathered and bummed cigarettes, since my smokes, watch, glasses etc were all missing. The impact and violence of the wreck pretty much removed it all. I looked around for car we hit and saw it was way down in a field, upside down. Someone mentioned they could not find the driver of that car so we were all tromping thru the weeds trying to find them. Finally, someone heard something. There was some moaning coming from under the car we t-boned. Turns out, the young woman who had been driving the car had been totally blown out of her car. We hit her at the drivers door and blew her out the passengers door. Her car flipped and bounced down to where it finally landed. She was laying on her back with her legs up on top of her shoulders....bent in half, with her car upside down on top of her. Once she was found, her car was rolled off her. Another ambulance came and loaded her and I and headed to the hospital. Up to this point, I felt no pain. With all the nerve damage, at most I felt like I had bumped my head. We got to the hospital and, feeling no pain, I wanted to walk in but they wouldn't let me. They sat me down in a wheelchair and as they were wheeling me in, I saw Larry walking towards me. Now, up to this point, I felt pretty ok. I really felt that there were no problems. I saw Larry. I waved. He stopped dead in his tracks, looking at me. When I saw the blood drain from his face, at that precise moment, I knew I was in trouble. I mean, as strong as Larry is, when he visibly paled when seeing me, I became very concerned. After a number of hours in surgery, I was finally sewn back together. Nearly 200 stitches in my face/head with another dozen or so in my leg.

This whole incident took place around 1972. My memories are still very vivid about the accident. I can close my eyes and see (and hear and *taste*) every detail. I'm not sure if that is good or bad.

Recently, I asked Larry to tell the story from his perspective. As strange as it sounds, I never really asked him about that. So, this is what he has to say about that evening....

Larry says....
Some of us are lucky enough to meet people as we amble through our lives who rapidly become important in our lives and my adopted brother Ern was one of those chance meetings. We rapidly became buddies then good friends and not too long after meeting each other we were almost like brothers. If we had been able to ask Edgar Cayce, he would probably have said that we had been twins in a previous existence or some foolishness like that.

I've wondered many times over the past 35 years if Ern's Dakota Sioux genes and my Seminole genes sort of latched onto each other out of kinship. Neither of us has ever been able to explain why we sort of adopted each other and have remained surrogate brothers for so long even though I've been here in the deep South and Ern has been a thousand miles away in Minnesota for most of that time.

Ern was fresh out of the Navy and was working on becoming a civilian again while he worked some physical jobs so that Mama and the young'uns could eat regularly and have a roof over their heads. When I say physical jobs I'm talking about un-air conditioned jobs like slinging tires or driving a route truck for Coca Cola in this Gawd awful south west Georgia heat where it can easily be 115 in the shade and even hotter out in direct sun light.

I was getting really tired of working 12 to 14 hours a day and 7 days a week managing a really mickey mouse, hole in the wall, dry cleaning plant where my work area was usually bouncing around a steamy 140 degrees so both of us wound up working for an old crazy genius drawing machine parts. At least it was air conditioned and we could work for only 8 hours and do our jobs sitting down.

When the EMT program opened up Ern and I talked it over and decided to gang up on them and see if we were the type of folks they were looking for. Since both of us were accepted into the training I guess we were. We also changed jobs together, got our state licenses and started selling insurance as Debit Agents so that we would have enough free time to concentrate on the EMT training which wasn't anything close to easy. In fact, the Doctor who was heading up the program announced the very first night that he intended to flunk as many of us out of the program as possible because he wanted only the very best. Eighty some odd people started the program and 18 of us completed it.

There are a whole wagon load of stories that could be told about things that popped up during our schooling but I'm going to skip those now and move on to the biggest scare of my life.

I was working in the Emergency Room that night as the resident gofer and lackey, doing the unpleasant things that the lowest person on the totem pole always gets stuck with. You know, inventories, restocking the trauma rooms, cleaning up the random mystery fluids and sanitizing everything except the Doctors and Nurses. (Ern and I were still trainees and hadn't been accepted into the clan.)

Since I could hear the radios I was aware that Ern was on a call to a reported heart attack up north of Albany toward Leesburg and was riding as the third man in the ambulance. It was only a few minutes till another panicky call came in that one of our ambulances had crashed and it was bad, really bad.

When another ambulance was dispatched to the heart attack, I knew that Ern was involved in that wreck. Within a few seconds another ambulance was dispatched to the ambulance wreck and one was placed on standby if needed. It was needed and it was dispatched "Urgent Code 3". Things weren't sounding real good.

Chitchat on the police frequency armed us with unnerving bits and pieces of info like "Looks like somebody's face took out the windshield", "Gawd, this ambulance ain't nuttin but a pile of scrap", "The ambulance knocked that big ol' Ford station wagon about a hundred feet sideways and almost cut it in half".

Finally, one of the meat wagons reported that they were headed back to the ER with one of the new EMT's and would arrive in 8 or 9 minutes. That's when I knew that Ern was coming in as a patient. I had never really thought about how long 8 or 9 minutes could be but I remember feeling that I was gonna grow real old before that ambulance got in. Other chit chat said stuff like "severe facial and scalp lacerations", "possible skull fractures", "combative patient", and other things that didn't make me feel any more at ease because the things that they were saying were all things that could be associated with brain damage.

When the ambulance announced its arrival I broke protocol and went out to the entry doors. The ER Charge Nurse was working hard to hold Ern in a wheel chair because he was struggling to get out and walk. That was another not so good indicator of a scrambled brain. I think I told him to sit still and shut up because he wasn't looking too good at all. His face had the color of new snow. One eyebrow was sagging down over his eye, his nose was laid wide open where his glasses had neatly sliced him but the part that really got to me was that hand size chunk of skull that was shining where hair used to grow.

The good news is that he didn't die nor is he much weirder now than he was before the wreck. I think he holds the title as the only Indian to survive being scalped in the 20th century.

By the time of the wreck, Ern and I had a couple of years in training. Ern stuck with it for about another year after he recovered but he was never able to peacefully fly low to a call after he almost got killed so he quit to save his sanity. I hung on for a while after Ern left but I found that I just didn't have the fortitude to deal with the sad remains of brutalized and DOA children.