A Comedy Of Errors

I'm sure it wasn't viewed as hilarious by the patient or by the restaurant owners but this was one of those calls that kept us laughing all day long.

We were called to a restaurant for a waitress with abdominal pain. The restaurant was a steak house in an old converted ranch style house. We were taken upstairs to what I guess was the employee lounge where we found our patient. She was in her twenties, very thin, and curled up on a couch. The cause of the abdominal pain was unknown, but her pregnancy status was in question as was her possible history of drug use. Since we were upstairs, the ambulance couldn't bring the gurney up to us so we had to carry the patient down to the gurney. Because she was so light and it would have been harder to move her down the stairs with two people. I decided to just carry her myself. I scooped her off the couch and moved toward the stairs. She wasn't heavy but I didn't have the best grip on her so I tried to readjust. Without even thinking I automatically did what anyone does when holding a child in their arms, I bounced her up to move my grip further underneath her. This is usually fun for the child but not so good for the patient with abdominal pain as evidenced by her groan and the "what the hell are you doing" look the firefighter gave me.

Meanwhile, my captain was making room for me at the bottom of the stairs so I could get the girl to the ambulance crew. There was a cluster of restaurant supplies and an assortment of maintenance odds and ends being stored there. As I descended the staircase, the captain moved the first piece from the pile, a metal shelf. What followed was straight out of a Ben Stiller movie. The piece he moved was apparently tenuously supporting a crate of glassware which then crashed to the floor. In an effort to stop the cascade of falling glasses he dropped the metal shelf which loudly clanged to the floor and continued to resonate as it wobbled around. This is when the rest of the pile began to give way and we watched as he helplessly turned from one piece to the next, unable to stop a single one from crashing to the floor. As he frantically turned in circles, clutching at falling objects, I stood on the stairs holding our patient in my arms trying desperately not to laugh out loud and listening to the 'crash, crash, clang, (pause) crash, (pause) clang, (longer pause) crash, crash, crash, clang (pause) crash' that seemed to go on for about five minutes. My captain finally had to just step away as anxious busboys rushed in and tried unsuccessfully to salvage the situation.
I carefully made my way through the debris field and delivered the patient, gently, to the gurney. We then returned to quarters where, over the course of the shift, my captain's face eventually returned to a normal color and the firefighter and I continued to laugh every time we looked at each other.