Sometimes I miss being a paramedic, until I think of this part.
I came out of a house once with all of my equipment covered in cat hair, cat poop, and roaches. It was the middle of July, called on a unresponsive person inside the house. The house was a typical 3bdrm brick home in the middle of a decent neighborhood. Walking up to the house, I started seeing strange looks from the PD that had arrived just prior. Entering the house, it was dark, curtains closed, filled with a putrid stench I can still smell to this day, open moldy, half-eaten containers of food everywhere, filled with trash halfway to the ceiling, no A/C, you get the picture. The older lady in the house literally had narrow trails carved through trash piled up at least 3-4 feet on either side, to walk fom room to room. It was impossible to get into the bedrooms because the hallway and bedrooms were full. The bathroom was unaccessible as well, so I'm guessing she just used the living room or whereever. She was unresponsive in the middle of the kitchen "trail", blown pupil, heatstroke, and when I went to roll her on her side to place her on a spine board to get her out, I stuck my hand in her axilla. Mistake. It was a raw, massive gooey lesions filled with cockroaches. As soon as we rolled her over, it was like you had disrupted roach central. Hundreds of them, under the body, scattered. All across my boots, my partners boots, equipment. Everwhere. We literally had to strap her to a spine board, with a foot board, stand her almost vertically and "fish-walk" it out of the house. Out of the house, into the ambulance off to the hospital. At St. Johns, everything proceeded relatively normally until a nurse tried to put a foley in the patient. Apparently during the procedure, a bug poked it's head out from the umm... netherregions, and there was a short, badly-muffled scream from the room.
She died (the patient, not the nurse) shortly thereafter (duh) Let's just say it's a call I'll never forget.
