Buddhist Exorcisms

This may not be the strangest call in the history of emergency medical services, but it's damned sure the oddest one I've ever gone on.

As you may or may not know, my volunteer fire department covers a very quiet suburban area of my county, so for experience, I'll ride with the local EMS service as a third crew member. Let's call them Big City/Big County EMS System.

So, it's Saturday night and two of my buddies are working at Big City/Big County EMS System. Since I have no life, I decide to ride for a while with them that night. Shortly after I get there, the pager goes off and sends us to an apartment complex for a seizure.

As we arrive, we notice that our adult male caller and his mother are obviously new to the country. Their apartment is an interesting combination of Salvation Army thrift furniture and Southeast Asian bazaar.

We enter the back bedroom and find the approximately 50 year old Asian woman shaking on the bed and refusing to talk to us. We ask the son what's happening and find out his English proficiency is slightly less than the illegal alien who refills your chips at your local Tex-Mex restaurant. After a bit of confusion, we find out out that their language of choice is Burmese. Now, where are you going to find a Burmese speaker on Saturday night in a Texas city?

Easily enough, we call our dispatcher who patches us through to a translation service. We lay down a cell phone and put it on speaker phone. Eventually, we learn that the woman's husband just died and she believes his spirit has possessed her. Thumbing through my protocols, I find that our medical director, in his love of Evidence Based Medicine, has not yet added a protocol for possessions. (Nor has he added Haldol to our protocols, but that's another story for another time.) We then ask what we can do to help her. She asks for a Buddhist priest to perform an exorcism.

Now, I'm all for customer service and meeting patient's needs, but that's one thing I can't pull off. We explain to the patient that we don't do exorcisms and start to leave. As we gather up the various bags used by a modern EMS agency, our erstwhile patient enters the living area, where she begins repeatedly bowing and chanting in front of a family altar. We again ask if she wants to go to the hospital before we leave. She replies in her best attempt at English that she just wants to die.

BINGO! She just said the one thing that guarantees a trip to the ER. We quickly confer amongst ourselves and decide that the closest hospital is a Catholic hospital. Surely they have a priest. Priests do exorcisms, right? And hey, Catholic is as close as you'll get to Buddhist on a Saturday night in central Texas, right?

So we tell her to get on our stretcher and we roll her into the northwest campus of Our Lady of Eternal Fundraising's ER. Amazingly, as we give the patient report to the charge nurse, she looks up from her chart and greets the patient by name.

Only in EMS. Only on a Saturday night.