On a Friday in the middle of the night I was completing a static patrol on the property line when I found someone in need of assistance. Friday nights are a wonderful time to watch drunk people do drunk things in all their glory. I call this the drunk parade and over the years I have seen drunks fight each other, jump things on rental bikes, hop between bollards, struggle to navigate flat ground and even pick fights with mail boxes (he actually lost). On this particular night I was told by my dispatcher to stay inside because I had been an unfortunate shit magnet for the last few shifts. I ignored his pleas and went in search of shit.

The drunk parade happens in stages but most people don't see it because they don't pay attention and or don't care.

Between 2300 and 0200 you may find drunk people but they are going between bars and they are generally pretty civil. If you are going to have any problems with that crowd it's going to be the person who had too much too quickly and or got separated from their friends.

Between 0200 and 0245 you will find lots of drunk people as the bars close and everyone leaves but these people are still generally alright to deal with. The problems you are likely to find in this crowd are people who had too much to drink, people who want more to drink, and or they don't want the night to end. There is also something to be said about the person who has been waiting all night to fight and is now full of liquid courage and has no place to be kicked out of. This is pretty rare though and even in the groups of young males full of piss and vinegar at this stage there are usually a few sober ones to keep that one drunk idiot, which every group seems to have, in check.

If you are going to have issues it's generally going to be with the crowd between 0245-0400. These are the people who didn't get any action at the bar, missed public transit, are pissed off, and are now walking around tipping over garbage cans and headbutting bus shelter windows. These are the people who need help and don't even realize it. These are also the people that make the best stories about completing a static patrol on a Friday night.

I have a particular place I like to stand. It's the same place I was punched a few years prior for trying to stop a drunk male from assaulting his girlfriend, the same place that featured an epic brawl a few years earlier featuring young men who took their shirts off but put their cowboy hats back on, and the same place I had hailed many cabs for drunk people like that one girl who shit her pants while throwing up in the flower garden while I kept her company.

Around 0300 I saw the silhouettes of two men approaching me from the nearby intersection. One was an enormous man and the other tiny, easily half the others weight. The big man was leaning on top of the small man who was struggling to both carry his weight and juggle a guitar in other hand. I somehow could just sense I was about to be part of that story.

I was waiting until they got closer so I could assess what was going on and offer any help but before they made it to me the large man fell and rolled out into the middle of a live lane of traffic. I instinctively ran towards him but hesitated as cars honked and swerved around him, I was afraid to see things I couldn't unsee. As I got closer, he didn't try to get up, he was sprawled out in the lane and appeared unconscious. The smaller man looked at me as if to indicate that it was a problem, just not his.

I called it into my dispatch and turned on the strobe feature on my flashlight putting it back in its holder to hopefully give me some visibility to traffic. I stepped onto the street to drag this guy off and that's when I realized he was easily over 300 pounds. In uniform I am six feet tall and 200 pounds but this was going to be a difficult drag by myself even if it was only 10 feet. I thought about waiting for someone else but as another car came and honked as it swerved around us, I decided I had to do it now, alone.

I pushed him up onto his butt and put my arms under his dragging backwards up off the road until we were on the sidewalk where we collapsed. By this time, he was awake and screaming for help. He had an enormous belly on him and a bald head. He was sweating too much for someone in the current weather conditions and reeked of alcohol. He was carrying a small backpack which he dwarfed causing me not to notice at first.

I find formalities awkward at this point, I require his consent to help and I should really introduce myself but those words feel stiff when standing over someone writhing in pain. "Hi, I'm Rex. Looks like you could use some help, I am a first responder and can help you. Tell me what's wrong." I always try to get this phrase out with a big friendly service-oriented smile and teddy-bear demeanor.

He introduced himself as Rick and told me that he had been drinking and met his new friend with the guitar a few blocks away. After spending the night drinking together, he started to have chest pains and has been struggling to stand and walk around ever since.

At this point in my life I had been to countless medical calls and had seen my share of health problems but It didn't matter because I knew the most important and invaluable question to ask in this situation; "when's the last time you felt like this?". He told me that the last time he felt this way was when he had a heart attack 2 years prior. Since then he has been living with an Implantable cardioverter-defibrillator and kept repeating with importance that it was "the one with the defibrillator". He was stating this fact because he was of the belief that you cannot use an external defibrillator on someone with an implantable defibrillator, a fact that I knew was false but didn't concern myself with.

He had all the classic symptoms of someone suffering from a heart attack including back pain, crushing chest pain, tingling in his left arm and what he perceived as bad gas. For the moment his heart was still beating and he was conscious which is what was important, the only thing I could do was treat for shock and make him comfortable until EMS arrived.

As my guards arrived with a medical bag and AED the new potential friend who had remained silent and didn't introduce himself suddenly decided he had other places to be and walked off into the night. Good friends are hard to find.

I administered oxygen hoping to treat for shock, calm him down, and oxygenate the heart muscle to keep it going. I asked him what the most comfortable position was to wait in for EMS arrival but he said he wanted to stay laying on his back due to the back pain.

EMS and Police arrived together which often happens when alcohol is involved. The police made it clear that they just wanted to keep the peace and weren't interested in starting anything if they didn't need too. EMS took over to get a set of vitals and were filled in on his SAMPLE and OPQRST. It was pretty clear that this was a load and go emergency and that Rick was going to the hospital. Several of us hoisted him onto the stretcher but the team of paramedics that arrived had a combined weight of close to Rick so both paramedics and I had to lift the stretched while one of my guards lifted the carriage to get him into the bus.

The comic relief came in the form of my guard who jammed his fingers between the carriage and the stretcher as it was put in to the ambulance. We had gotten it fully in when he turned to us with panic on his face and we didn't have to guess what was wrong. We had to pull it back out so he could get his fingers out. I was stuck somewhere between laughing and being concerned that he broke his fingers and I would have to fill out a report for an injured employee. He turned out fine, just a bruised ego.

Rick left in an ambulance bound for the unknown. I hope he is doing better now; we rarely get updates on patients once they leave our care.

What did I learn? - You are the most important person at a medical scene, if you get injured you can't help anyone and more people are required to help you. I took a calculated risk to extend someone's time on earth from (maybe) minutes to (hopefully) years. I took as many precautions as possible to not put myself at risk (strobing flashlights, reflectors) and maybe someday he will pay it forward. Sometimes the task requires nerves and strength, if you dig deep enough you will find both. There is a time and place to move a patient, when it happens, you'll know.