I burst through the door, through the kitchen. I see a woman standing looking at me, and for a moment I think I am in the wrong apartment – but then I see another woman laying on the couch – and while no one is doing CPR, the woman is still, her skin almost waxen.

Sometimes I have found parents do not like the idea of “an ambulance driver” giving their child morphine (perhaps they think it is similar to an ice cream truck driver selling them heroin) so I have on occasion called medical control with the parent at my side to have the physician reassure the parent that morphine would be a good medication for their screaming child with the fractured arm. Other parents, of course, have nodded agreeablely when I have told them I am planning to give their child morphine. Anything to ease their child’s suffering is agreeable to them. So pleased were they that I could have been offered honorary unclehood on the spot.

So today, I am still depressed after two days of reading through run forms of seeing patients in pain, and seeing their pain go untreated.

I continue to collect my data, continue to build my case.

In the meantime, frail old people, be careful.

It’s a mean world out there.

“I just know it,” I say. “It’s going to be a large person. And he’s going to be at the bottom of the basement stairs, and we’re going to have to board him and carry him up the stairs.”

“Maybe he’ll have already walked up the stairs for us.”

“Please, please let that be the case,” I say.

To the right is the living room, which is quite spare. There is a giant plasma TV on the wall, a coffee table and a long couch. There is also an idle vacuum cleaner on the plush white carpet. A police officer stands facing the couch where a young man sits, head in arms, crying.

If there is one conference I go to next year, I would like to go to the annual EMS state of the Science Conference — better known as the Gathering of Eagles — held in Dallas each February.

The bottom line: paramedic out-of-hospital endotracheal intubation efforts were associated with multiple and prolonged CPR interruptions.

Down the corridor Jason straddles the gurney, thumbs on her sternum.