HEART BREAKING

You have all said it, or at least thought it. Cops are uncaring, insensitive people. To some aspect your right. We have to turn off our senses or we would go crazy. You can't work with death and destruction all around you every day and not turn it off. There is a line we must walk where we have to turn it off and on at a moments notice. This story is one of those times.

While on patrol I get a call for a welfare concern. Someone is concerned about another's health and or well-being. In this case both, an elderly man has not been seen in days and a friend of his called in.

I locate the residence, which is a dilapidated mobile home. The trees in front have broken limbs which have fallen onto the home, the front porch is rotting away and it appears that there is no electricity. Knocking on the door gets no response and I'm thinking to myself this is going to be a DRT (Dead Right There). The front door is ajar so I enter the home.

This is something I've only seen on television, the home is full of trash. I mean full, there is a path from the front door through the living room to the kitchen and down the hall, the rest of the house is solid trash at least two feet high. You can not leave the path without climbing up two feet onto the trash. I make my way down the hall and as I do I pass the bathroom. The toilet is full of waste and paper, stacked on top of each other, FOUR feet high, no joke. The smell of waste, urine and trash fill the house. I am having to fight back the reflex of gagging with every step. When I find the bedroom the smell has increased ten fold and in the bed is an elderly man about six feet tall and weighing in at 100 lbs. He's awake but in bad shape.

The old man is coherent but is so weak he can't get up. EMS won't take him cause he doesn't want to go. Adult Protective Services won't help because he's coherent. Lucky for me...I get the job of trying to talk him into going to the hospital. One of the EMT's on site is a friend of mine and I ask him to stay because I'm sure I can get this guy to go.

After two hours of trying to talk the old man into going with the EMTs and gathering info on the old man. The light bulb goes off as I find out the old man is a WW II veteran. I tell Gerry the EMT to get ready. I go back to the old man's room and ask about the war and tell him my grandfather was in the same war and we share a few stories. The EMTs are in the hall waiting for the word when I start to pace back and forth at the end of the old man's bed. The old man watches me and in my best DI voice I say "Get your sorry ass out of that bed soldier, you want to go out like this, covered in your own shit and piss? You made it across the beach, you killed to stay alive and come home to your family. You fought every day and now you just want to lay back and die? Not on my watch, are you ready to go and get cleaned up and fed?" And as I watched the tears fill his eyes he said yes. Before he could change his mind, myself and the two EMTs had him out the door and on the way to the Hospital where he made a full recovery.

That call was one of the hardest for me, just because it can happen to any of us. The old man's family was gone and he felt there was nothing left to live for. Lucky for him, he had at least one friend who cared enough to make a call. We have all been put out by an elderly person before, but before you bite, put yourself in their shoes.