Hello? Fire Department!

We had two distinctly different Life Alert calls this tour.  Most of the time these calls are accidental activations, requests for lift assist only, or minor injuries. Rarely are they serious medical calls.

Often people who have these monitors know enough to leave a hide-a-key for us or have a KnoxBox on their house.  A KnoxBox is a small box like a little safe requiring a fire department specific key to open it. They are usually mounted near the front door and contain a key to the house or business or what have you.

Dispatch will give us the key info on our update: "the key is located under the ceramic turtle on the porch" or "the code is 2742" or "the knox box is on the delta side of the building". Without these keys we would most likely be forcing entry into the house and doing damage.

This time it was the ceramic turtle kind. We found the key, knocked loudly and called out "Fire Department. Hello?" We got no response so we unlocked the door and headed in, again calling out loudly as we went. Still no response. We had worked our way back to the bedroom with the captain leading the way. From the doorway of the bedroom we saw a 90 year old woman wearing nothing but a shower cap, her back to us, inching her way extremely slowly out of the bathroom which was still steamy from the shower. We had been calling out the entire time and did so again from the doorway. Still no response. At this point we knew we were likely to terrify this woman when she finally turned around and saw us, so myself and my equally brave firefighter began backpedaling our way out of the room leaving my poor captain to confront the naked woman alone.

(But...you know...90. And with no towel.)

We retreated to the living room but heard no cries of alarm or objects being hurled - a good sign. This woman, though startled, responded rather calmly to appearing naked before a strange man who had entered her home without her knowledge. It was confirmed that it was an accidental activation of the panic button and we went on our way with only a sarcastic, "Thanks a lot guys" from our abandoned captain.


The second call ran much the same way but with the addition of the captain ordering us not to leave him alone this time. We got no response to our calls initially but found our patient down on the floor in the hallway pretty quickly. She was very out of it and was definitely having a medical emergency of some kind (possibly a seizure or a stroke). The ambulance had arrived right behind us and by the time we had made entry and found the woman they were on our heels. Although her eyes were open and she did not appear to have any obvious fall related injuries she could not respond to us appropriately and we got her going off to the hospital pretty rapidly. I never followed up to find out what had actually happened to her. In any case, we turned her lights off and locked her doors and returned the key to the KnoxBox.

I have run a lot more medical monitoring calls that turned out to be false alarms than actual emergencies. But when it is a true emergency those things are definitely life savers.