Part 2: I Drive an Ambulance. My Rescue Pit Bull Goes Everywhere With Me Except Inside the Rig. The Night a Man I Had Treated Hours Earlier Attacked Me in the Ambulance Bay, My Dog Was Locked in My Car Thirty Meters Away — and He Did Not Stay There.
Part 2
I have to tell you about the call from earlier that night, because the man in the parking lot did not come from nowhere. He came from my own ambulance.
It had been an ordinary shift until late. And then, a few hours before the end of it, my partner and I ran a call for an intoxicated man — a man who had been found in a bad way in a public place, heavily drunk, and who needed to be assessed and transported, which is a routine and frequent part of this job. We treated him. We transported him. He was, during the transport, agitated and difficult in the way that heavily intoxicated patients are sometimes agitated and difficult — verbally aggressive, hard to manage — but that, too, is routine. We are trained for it. We handed him off at the hospital, and we cleared, and we went back into service, and I did not think about him again.
I want to be clear about something, because it matters. I did nothing wrong in that man’s care. My partner did nothing wrong. We treated a difficult intoxicated patient the way we are trained to, with professionalism and without incident, and we delivered him safely to a hospital. That is the job. That is, on a great many nights, the entire job.
What I did not know — what I had no way to know — was that somewhere in his intoxicated, agitated state, that man had fixed on me. Had decided something about me. Had, when he was released from the hospital a couple of hours later, not gone home.
He had come back. He had come back to the EMS station, and he had found his way to the crew parking lot, and he had waited there, in the dark, near the ambulance bay, for my shift to end.
I knew none of this. I finished my shift. I did the end-of-shift things — the paperwork, the restocking, the handoff. And a little after the end of my shift, I walked out of the station and into the parking lot, tired the way you are tired after a twelve-hour shift, my mind already on the drive home, on my dog waiting in my car, on my bed.
And a man came out of the dark between the vehicles.
It was him. I recognized him in the half-second before I understood what was happening. And in that half-second he was already on me, and he was strong, and he was using the strength, and he pushed me — fast, and hard, and with intent — backward, through the open rear doors of an ambulance that was parked in the bay, up into the patient compartment of the rig.
And he climbed in after me, and he pulled the doors most of the way shut behind him.
Part 3
I am going to tell you about the next part carefully, and I am going to tell you only what is necessary, because what that man intended to do to me in the back of that ambulance is not a thing I am going to lay out in detail, for you or for anyone. It is enough for you to know that I understood, completely and instantly, that I was in the most serious danger of my life, and that the man who had me had come there for a reason, and that the reason was very bad.
I fought. I want to say that, because it matters to me to say it. I am a paramedic; I am not a small or a soft person; I have spent eleven years managing physically difficult situations, and I did not freeze and I did not go quiet. I fought him, in that compartment, with everything I had.
But he was bigger than me, and he was stronger than me, and he had the surprise of it, and he had me in an enclosed metal space with the doors pulled to. I fought, and I was losing, and there is a particular kind of fear that arrives when you are fighting as hard as you can fight and you can feel it not being enough — and that fear arrived, in the back of that ambulance, and I knew.
So I screamed.
I screamed as loudly as a human being can scream. Not because I had thought it through — there was no thinking, at that point — but because it is what is left, what the body does, the oldest call for help there is. I screamed into the dark of a parking lot at the end of a shift, with a man on top of me and the ambulance doors pulled shut, and I did not believe, screaming, that it was going to bring me anything.
There was no one in that lot. My partner had already gone. The station was quiet. The nearest person who could have heard me and helped me was inside a building, behind walls, too far.
The nearest person who could help me was not a person.
Thirty meters away, across that dark parking lot, in my own personal car, with the windows up and the doors locked, my dog Ambu was waiting for me to finish my shift.
And Ambu heard me scream.
Part 4
I did not see this part. I was inside the ambulance, fighting for my life. I have pieced this part together afterward — from the physical evidence, from the police, from the security footage of that lot, and from what I know, after four years, of my own dog. And I am going to tell it to you the way it happened.
Ambu was in my car. The car was locked. The windows were up. Ambu had waited out my shifts in that car a hundred times — it was a known thing, a calm thing, the ordinary boredom of a dog waiting for his person. There was nothing in four years of his experience that would have prepared him for what he heard that night, and nothing that had ever taught him what to do about it.
He heard me scream.
And Ambu — who had never, in four years with me, shown a single moment of aggression; who was, in every ordinary hour of his life, the gentlest creature I have ever known — Ambu did the thing that I will spend the rest of my life trying to be worthy of.
He went through the car window.
I want you to sit with that, the way I have had to. The window of a car is not a thing a dog gets through easily, or safely, or without paying for it. Ambu hit that window, and he hit it again, and he kept hitting it — and the security footage, which I have watched exactly once and will never watch again, shows him doing it, shows a dog throwing his own body and his own head against a sheet of automotive glass, over and over, until it broke. He broke a car window with his body. He cut his head open doing it. And the instant the glass gave, he was through it, and he was out, and he was bleeding from the head, and he was running.
Thirty meters. Across a dark parking lot. A bleeding Pit Bull, running flat-out toward the sound of his person screaming.
He reached the ambulance. The doors had been pulled to, but not latched — and a dog the size and the determination of Ambu does not need a door latched-shut to be defeated; he needs it merely closed, and a closed door he can get through. He came through those rear doors of the rig, up into the patient compartment, into the dark and the violence, bleeding, and he did the second thing that I will spend the rest of my life being unable to fully repay.
He put himself between me and the man.
Part 5
I am going to tell you what happened in that compartment when Ambu came through the doors, and I am going to tell it plainly, because the plainness is the truth of it.
The man who was attacking me did not, until that instant, know there was a dog in the world that night. There had been no dog in his planning. He had checked, I have to assume, for people — for witnesses, for partners, for help — and he had found none, and he had been right that there were none. He had not checked for a dog, because who checks for a dog, because the dog was supposed to be locked in a car thirty meters away behind a sheet of glass.
And then sixty pounds of bleeding, terrified, absolutely committed Pit Bull came up through the back doors of that ambulance, and the whole shape of that night changed in under two seconds.
Ambu went straight for the man. He did the thing his body decided to do, which was to take hold of the man — and a Pit Bull who has decided to take hold of someone is not a thing a person fights off with their hands — and the man’s entire attention, his entire body, every bit of the strength he had been using on me, was instantly, completely consumed by the animal that had hold of him.
And in that gap — the gap Ambu had torn open in the middle of the worst moment of my life — I got free.
I got out of the back of that ambulance. I got to the ground, and I got distance, and I was screaming again, but this time I was screaming words, screaming for help across a lot that someone, finally, was close enough to hear — and the police, who had been called, were already coming, because the security system and the noise had done their work.
The police reached that ambulance bay within a few minutes. They found a paramedic on the ground, shaking but alive. They found a man with a dog still holding him, a man who was no longer any danger to anyone, a man they took into custody on the spot and who has since, I will tell you, faced the full and serious legal consequences of what he came back to that parking lot to do.
And they found Ambu.
Ambu, who let go of the man the moment there were officers there to take him — who did not have to be pulled off, who simply, his job done, released the man and came to me, across the last few feet of that parking lot, and pressed his bleeding head against me, and stood there, leaning, the way he had leaned on my shins in a shelter four years before.
I got my arms around my dog, on the ground of that parking lot, and I held on, and I felt his blood on me, and I have never in my life been so completely undone by gratitude and by love.
Part 6
I want to tell you about the veterinary clinic, because the clinic is where this story let me, for one moment, breathe — and where I said the thing I most needed to say.
We went straight from that parking lot to a twenty-four-hour emergency veterinary clinic — a police officer drove us, my dog and me, because I was in no condition to drive and would not be parted from Ambu for one second. And the vet examined him, and the news, in the scale of everything that could have been true that night, was the news I needed.
Ambu was going to be fine.
He had hurt himself badly on that window. The cuts on his head were significant — he needed fourteen stitches, fourteen, across his head and scalp, the price he had paid in his own blood for getting through a sheet of glass that should have stopped him and did not. But the injuries were to the surface. Nothing deeper. Nothing that would not heal. My dog had broken a car window with his own skull and he was going to walk out of that clinic and recover and be, in time, entirely himself.
I sat in that clinic with him after they had stitched him, my gentle goofy Pit Bull with fourteen stitches in his head, and I was a wreck — I was crying, and shaking, and four hours of adrenaline and terror were coming out of me all at once.
And I did the thing you do, when a thing is too large to hold. I made it small enough to carry. I made a joke.
I leaned my forehead very gently against Ambu’s uninjured side, and I said to him: “You broke my car window. You hear me? That window was expensive. You owe me a window, you ridiculous animal. You are going to pay me back for that window.”
And Ambu turned his head, and he looked at me — fourteen stitches and all — and he wagged his tail.
He wagged his tail, in that clinic, at the sound of me scolding him about a window, because he is a dog, and the sound of his person talking to him is a good sound, and he did not know and could not know that I was not really scolding him, that there was no joke, that “you owe me a window” was the only sentence small enough for me to fit the entire weight of what he had done into without breaking apart completely.
I laughed, and I cried, at exactly the same time, with my arms around a stitched-up dog in a veterinary clinic at four in the morning.
He had broken my window.
He had also, about an hour before, broken it the other direction — and saved my life.
Part 7
I want to tell you what changed, because something did, officially and permanently, and it is the thing I am proudest of in this entire story.
In the weeks after that night, the story of what Ambu had done moved through my EMS service, and then through the city department that oversees it, and it reached the people who write the policy.
And about a month later, the department changed the rule.
The rule — the one rule, the rule that had kept Ambu out of the rig, the rule that had put thirty meters and a sheet of glass between my dog and me on the worst night of my life — that rule was rewritten. The department adopted a new policy permitting a paramedic’s qualified service or working dog to be present in the cab of the ambulance during shifts, when there is no patient on board.
I want to be precise and fair about this, because I do not want to misrepresent it. Ambu is not permitted in the patient compartment during a call. He is not in the rig when we are treating a patient — the clinical environment is still, correctly, kept clinical. The new policy is narrow. It is specific. It permits a working dog in the cab, between calls, when the rig is in service but empty of patients.
But that narrow change is everything.
Because it means that Ambu was assessed, and approved, and outfitted, and that he now rides with me. He sits in the cab of my ambulance, between calls, on the long quiet stretches of a shift, in a vest that identifies him as a working dog. The thirty meters are gone. The locked car in the parking lot is gone. The one gap in four years of my life that my dog was not allowed to fill — the EMS department reached into it, after that night, and closed it.
Ambu is the first dog in the history of my service to ride in the cab of an ambulance. He earned that, with fourteen stitches, on a night nobody had planned for, doing a thing nobody had trained him to do.
Part 8
It has been a little over a year.
Ambu rides with me now. Every shift. He has a vest, and it says, simply, that he is a working dog, and he sits in the cab of my rig on the long stretches between calls, gray coming very slightly into his brown-and-white face, the small scars from fourteen stitches hidden now under fur that grew back over them.
My coworkers love him. The children we sometimes encounter on calls — when there is a child, and a frightening night, and a moment between things — light up at the sight of a dog in a working vest in the front of an ambulance. Ambu has become, in his quiet way, part of the service.
People ask me, sometimes, when they hear the story, whether it is strange — whether it is hard — to spend my working life in the vehicle that is tied, now, to the worst night I have ever lived through.
It is not. And I am going to tell you why, and then I am going to be finished.
I am a paramedic. My entire career, my entire adult life, has been built around a single idea — that when a person is in the worst moment of their life, someone comes. That help is real, that it can arrive in time, that no one should have to face the worst thing alone. I have spent eleven years being the one who comes. I have been, for thousands of strangers, the help that arrived.
And on one night, in a dark parking lot, I was the one in the worst moment. I was the one who needed the help to come. And it came — not from a partner, not from the police in time, not from any of the systems I have given my life to. It came from a shelter Pit Bull who heard me through a car window thirty meters away and decided that a sheet of glass was not going to be the thing that kept him from me.
People say to me: “Ambu is so lucky you rescued him from that shelter.”
And I tell them the truth. I tell them that I have spent eleven years as a paramedic, and that I know exactly what it means to save a life, and that by that standard, the standard of my own profession, Ambu is the finest paramedic I have ever known.
Because Ambu got there first. Ambu got there in time. Ambu’s hands were not enough and so Ambu used everything he had, his body and his blood and his whole heart, and Ambu did the thing the job is actually about.
He saved a life.
The first one he ever saved was mine.
Good boy, Ambu.
You still owe me a window.
Keep it forever.
Follow this page for more stories about the ones who heard us scream — and did not let anything stand in the way.
