Death on the sidewalk

So today sucked. I woke up this morning pissy, hot, and sweating to the shrill of my alarm. It's always a bad sign when you wake up sweating. It means that it is fucking hot outside, like if the surface of the sun with 98% humidity hot. And I get to put on my polyester blend uniform on. yipee. Although I took a shower, once I stepped outside to go to work at 0930 the shower was null and void. By 0945 when we put our ambulance in service It was 90 degrees outside and 90% humidity. Which according to the weatherman translate into it "feels like 711 degrees" Oh and it the Fourth of July...this is the southern rednecks favorite holiday. "we get to drink all day, then light shit on fire...yeehaaw" Not only was I in no mood to even be at work, neither was my partner. He too was in a fucking pissed off mood from the get go. But here we were two medics sick and tired of the sick and stupid. Our first call was...Well I can't remember anything about it except that it smelled really bad in the back of the truck for like four hours...But our 6th call was a DOA on a sidewalk. It's amazing how clueless some people are. We get called at close to four o'clock for a "Unconscious not alert heat related" Halfway to the call dispatch advises us that this is a possible full arrest. Great. Working a full arrest outside in the sun sounds like just what I wanted to do. On arrival we are greeted by a guy who smells like he fell into a bottle of cheap booze and then ran marathon. "He not moved when I poke at 'em so I call the EMS"
He then took us arounf the corner of the building to a man laying in the middle of the sidewalk. Our patient was not moving and had a few flies buzzing around his head. There was a one legged woman sitting in a wheelchair nearby that identified herself as the patients mother. Now just walking up to this guy it was obvious this guy was no longer of this mortal world and had not been for sometime. according the Wheelchair bound woman He had been laying in the yard since she got home from dialysis at 1030 this morning. She said that she tried to get him to come inside because it was hot outside, but he just laid there. So like any good parent she went inside and So every so 30 mins or so she would go out and check on her "sleeping" son on the front yard. Finally at 3 o'clock the dead mans brother came by and poked at him a few times with a stick. So for like 5 hours this man had been laying there...Dead...On the sidewalk. When we got there the man was stiff, like whole body, can't move the limbs stiff and assuming outside temperature. So there we were two medics, four firemen, three cops and the coroner trying to put the pieces together from information given to us by a drunk and a invalid mother ( who herself was on her last leg...No pun intended) The mother just kept saying "Oh Lord my baby has passed? There ain't nothing you can do? Oh Lord has taken my baby." What can you say to that. He had been there for hours. My partner and I just tried our best to comfort the mother, who I don't think grasped the Idea that her son had died and that was the reason he would not come into the house. I have seen dead in the bed. I have seen dead in the bathroom. I have seen dead in the water, but this was the first dead on the front lawn.

The rest of my shift was uneventful. No lives to be saved today. Sometimes there is just nothing you can do...No matter how hard you try.