Stephen Murray
Appearances
This American Life
809: The Call
I'm like, hello, anybody here? Like, EMS? With the cops that are behind me, they're yelling out, and I'm looking around, and I get down this hallway.
This American Life
809: The Call
And I find a girl laying on the ground, or a woman laying on the ground, but she's very small. And she looked really young and she was blue. And so I was like, crap.
This American Life
809: The Call
Well, because nobody's there and she's blue. When someone's blue, I know they're not breathing.
This American Life
809: The Call
That's where my mind went immediately was that here's somebody who's alone. She's blue on the ground. And I find her pulse and it's quite slow. So it's like in the 40s. So I turned to the cop and said, she's got a pulse. The bathroom is quite small though. And I'm big and it's really hard to work on somebody when you can't kneel down next to them.
This American Life
809: The Call
And so I put my arms under hers and I drag her into the living room, down the hallway to the living room. And at that point, the rest of my crew had brought all of our equipment upstairs. So they were like, they came up and put down our bag next to me.
This American Life
809: The Call
So I grabbed the bag valve mask out, hooked it up to oxygen, and started to breathe for her. And in the meantime, I directed one of my staff members to draw me up to pull out an arcane and put a needle on it, because I like to give it intramuscularly, because I can control the dose better.
This American Life
809: The Call
Well, because the thing is, I've seen people come out and vomit and feel unwell. And when I first started EMS, I remember the police would be standing over them like, what did you use? Yelling at them. I started to think about what is that environment like when they wake up? If there are too many people in the room, I will tell people to go wait outside.
This American Life
809: The Call
Her color improves, her oxygen saturation comes up, and she then wakes up.
This American Life
809: The Call
The people that I fell in with, my group of friends, we all met at the tables that were outside the dorms. And we would smoke cigarettes outside. It was like this thing. And the guy that used to sell us our weed, he was great. He was just like this really cool... I can't even describe him. He was like... He would show up with a fishing tackle box full of drugs. It was like a menu, right?
This American Life
809: The Call
And so he was like, oh, like, if I remember right, he was like, oh, you should try it. These will make you feel better. And that was like oxycodone.
This American Life
809: The Call
At the time, they were saying I was the youngest elected official that had ever happened in South Florida. I don't know if that's, like, verifiable, but that's what people were saying about me. And, like, and here I am, like, using drugs the whole time.
This American Life
809: The Call
I used to wear, like, baggier clothes when I would talk to my parents. This is, like, the era when Skype was a thing. And I used to put under-eye concealer on my eyes. I have, like, sort of naturally dark circles under my eyes. But because I had lost so much weight and was so sunken in, they were very, like, pronounced.
This American Life
809: The Call
And so I would put, like, under-eye concealer on before I would go on camera with my parents. Wow. And actually, like, the camera would be faced backward where I had all my, like...
This American Life
809: The Call
accolades on the wall like certificate of election from like the board of elections and like i got a letter from a congressman congratulating me on being elected and like just like those things like behind me but on the other side of the camera my life was chaos so yeah
This American Life
809: The Call
And like, now I'm Stephen the firefighter. And it was like, I'm a firefighter. That's pretty cool.
This American Life
809: The Call
And the street address that was given, we'll say, for example, that was 313, like 313. And we get there and there is no 313. Right.
This American Life
809: The Call
And so in this particular case, like, that didn't happen. And so we just start to go knock on doors and look. And so, like, that went on. We knocked on a bunch of doors and, like, nobody ever came out. And so the other thing that dispatch will try to do is they'll try to call the person back repeatedly. You know, nobody answered on the call back. And so...
This American Life
809: The Call
You know, eventually we have like finite resources. So the next calls are coming in and like we have to move on.
This American Life
809: The Call
She was right around the corner from the, um, from the door that I had looked at. And I just thought to myself, like, I was like six feet from her. And like, when I got there, she was probably, you know, we could still have saved her. And that was actually somebody that I had reversed an overdose on in the past. I hadn't stayed like in like a, in real touch, but like she worked in the community.
This American Life
809: The Call
I made this simple design on Vistaprint. And I'm not a web designer or a graphic designer, so it looks terrible. But basically it was like, this is the Massachusetts line, here's the number, this is what we do. And so I used my credit card and bought like 5,000 of those.
This American Life
809: The Call
So they had the back doors of the ambulance open, and I stepped up into the back to talk to them. And it dawned on me again, like, oh, she was alone. So I said something along the lines of, like, you know, whoever was here with you called and left. You need to tell them never to do that again. They need to stay with you until we get here. And then she said... Oh my god, he thought.
This American Life
809: The Call
When he got back to the station, that's when he started texting Jesse. And that's when it all kind of came out of him. Like, I couldn't believe it. Like, we sobbed on the phone together. I was in my office. Like, there was this, like, conference room thing that I was in. And I had the door closed when I was talking to her. And we're just in there, like, crying with her.
This American Life
809: The Call
So it came in as an unresponsive possible overdose. That's all we really got. And when I heard the address, I was like, oh, that's really close by.
This American Life
809: The Call
It was one engine company, three police, cruisers, and two ambulances. We get there and I'm looking at the building and there's multiple units within this big house.