I remember the first time I ever saw a real whale in the wild. I went on a whale-watching tour out on the Pacific ocean, and after tooling around for a little while in a tiny boat we happened upon a pod of humpback whales. They kept coming to the surface and spouting, and one got so close that I swear I could have reached out and touched it right from the railing. I mostly remember two things about that day; one, whales smell terrible. They smell like rotting sea garbage. And the second thing I remember is that I couldn't get over the idea that something that big, could be alive. They were so massive and powerful, the only thing in my life I could compare it to would've been something like a steam-train.
I also remember when I was in Iraq. We had to go do some training revolved around driving fast and shooting, skills which I'd hoped at the time would be unnecessary. In order to do this type of training, we had to get as far away from people as possible, for obvious reasons. So we drove out into the middle of the desert, and we drove all day. It was literally almost a hundred and ten degrees in the middle of the day, and we just kept driving. At about the fourth hour of puttering a long we came across a herd of camels meandering across our route. There were probably twenty of them, brown ones and white ones and even a couple babies. We had to stop when they crossed our path, and I sat there and watched as a few of them walked right past the front of my humvee.
That day I remember thinking something similar to what I'd felt watching the whales. They were quite large, in fact, up until that point I guess I'd never really taken the time to realize just how big a camel really is. In some domesticated suburban part of my brain, I'd just automatically assigned camels to the "about as big as a horse" category. Turns out they're about a horse and a half. But the thought that really gripped me, as I sat baking in my humvee, is "How are they still alive?" We'd been driving for hours and hadn't seen so much as a tumbleweed, and these animals are somehow able to survive. And somehow thrive, you don't get to be eight feet tall eating sand. That thought stayed with me for a long time, how could such a thing be possible.
Tonight I had that experience again. I went on a call to a care facility, and there is a patient there who needed to be transported via ambulance to the hospital for some non-emergency care. The reason they needed firefighters there is because this guy, that we'll call Clyde, weighs in excess of 1,100 lbs. He is rumored to be the second heaviest man in America.
Working at this firestation I'd heard rumors about Clyde, but I just couldn't imagine what a person that big would be like. I've watched all the shows like, Life in the Obesity clinic, so I figured I had a pretty good grasp on what I would be dealing with. I was wrong, because I wasn't prepared at all for what I would see and have to do.
Clyde was laying on his bed with his legs splayed out, tennis shoes and socks on his feet, while the rest of him was covered only mostly by a sheet. He looked a giant puddle of a person, or maybe a pile of a person would be more accurate. The idea here is that he is like an amorphous blob with a head.
There were about ten of us there, all milling around, trying to get the oversize stretcher and lift system into place in preparation of our move. He seemed to be unaware of what we were there to do as he happily went on playing his videogames.
Finally when one of the medics asked him about the sheet he was laying on, he said "Oh yeah, I'm gonna need a new sheet, this one is soiled." It took a moment for what this really meant to sink in for me. Then he said, "When you roll me, they're going to have to clean me up." By then the horror of reality had caught up with me. He had been sitting there, playing his videogames, for god knows how long stewing in his own filth. He was just waiting for the right opportunity to come along so someone could clean him up. How convenient that I could be there for this.
So we get all our systems in place and about eight of us gather around the bed and pull the sheet down so we can get a better grip on him. His legs, oh my god, his legs. They didn't look like they belonged to a person, but rather maybe a midget elephant with bad circulation. They were huge and lumpy in all the wrong places. And when I put my hands on them I expected it to be like a mushy fleshy feeling, but I was wrong there too because his skin was as tough as what I'd expect a rhinoceros' hide to be like. Apparently his skin, after years of trying just to contain his bulk, had become thick like armor. We give the old heeve-ho, and roll him onto his side, and right then the nurses that had been waiting behind us come darting in with their giant baby wipes. I had been unfortunate to be on the business side of this roll, and I could read no sympathy in the eyes of my lucky compadres who'd chosen to be on the face side of this maneuver.
Now I have a diminished sense of smell, and I have never been more thankful for that fact until tonight. As I tried to concentrate on anything else, vapors still wafted up, so thick, I felt like I could see the stench. Those nurses, god bless'em, did their best, and since I went to my happy place, I have no idea how much progress they really made on cleaning him up, but what I do know is that, everything within four feet of his "business end" had fecal residue on it. The sheets, the stretcher, the harness, and unfortunately even my gloves all received their fair share of the filth.
Clyde treated all of this like it was a walk in the park. When we finally got him loaded, he was very casual, he just asked us to make sure the nurse brought his overnight bag for him, and once we tucked him into the ambulance he was on his merry way.
As I watched the ambulance creep away, I kept thinking, "How can that happen? How can he still be alive? How can something grow to be so huge?"
