Steel City Crumbling

Gary is simultaneously the most fascinating, and the most depressing, place I have ever been. To drive down these streets, seeing the abandoned houses, the abandoned businesses, vacant storefronts with broken-out windows and burned-out framing is to take a tour of urban decay at some of its worst.

At the same time, though, you can see the SHADOW that this city once was. Gary had begun its decline well before I was born, meaning that I never got to see it in its heyday. However, one of my colleagues has lived and worked in this city her entire life, and she has seen the full spectrum: bustling steel town, the beginning of its downward spiral, to what it is today: one step away from a ghost town.

The news reports out of Gary tend to highlight the negative: crime, gangs, drugs, murders, abuse of public assistance, corruption in government, lack of access to resources, urban decay. There is all of that. Just this morning, a Gary Police Officer, Jeffery Westerfield, was murdered in the line of duty. He was found by one of his fellow officers, dead in his cruiser, having been shot through the window of his car while on a traffic stop. I can't begin to imagine the anguish of his family, the fear and anger that his fellow officers are feeling, knowing that THIS COULD BE THE DAY.

As a Paramedic, we see an awful lot of death, destruction, chaos, filth, and greed. We see people at their worst; riddled with bullet holes, stab wounds, victims of assaults, rapes, beatings that leave the facial structure so unrecognizable that it's hard to imagine that that was once a person. It's so easy to become focused on those things, when you're spending as much time immersed in them as we do. Every Paramedic (indeed, every first responder, be they police, fire, or EMS) has to, to some degree, learn to let those things roll off of their shoulders. If we internalized all of the trauma and horror that we see on a daily basis, the mental health facilities of this country would be bursting at their already-overstretched seams with EMTs, Paramedics, firefighters, and police officers.

I try, as much as possible, to focus on the good that I see, and the good work I'm able to do in this city. I'm a native Chicagoan. I still live in Chicago, which has more than its fair share of problems itself. I work in Indiana, though, and specifically in "the region," because I wanted to work where people need Paramedics. This is GOOD WORK that we do out here. There are tens of thousands of people living in this city, and throughout Lake County, that are just genuinely down on their luck. People who built lives here before Inland Steel shut down, when Harbor Steel was still running a full three shifts, employing tens of thousands of people in good, union jobs that paid solid, middle-class salaries. Now, there are no jobs, which means there is no money, which means there is no money to be spent, which means businesses close, which means fewer jobs, and around and around we go.

I've had the opportunity to meet some really amazing people, and occasionally, to help them through a really tough time. The 86 year-old man, who worked for U.S. Steel for 43 years, who still lives in the Glen Park area, whose COPD is so bad from decades of coke fumes and smoke in the mills that he can't move from one room of the house to the other without needing his nebulizer. That man told me, in two and three-word sentences, that he had built a life here for himself and his family, and he'd be damned if he'd leave any other way than in a box. All the while, I'm trying to decide if I need to intubate him NOW, while I still can, or if the BiPAP and the in-line neb treatments and epi were going to be enough to keep him alive.

There was the 79 year old man, who woke up having trouble breathing. His wife called 911 for an ambulance, and from the time we were dispatched until the time we got on scene, he deteriorated from difficulty breathing, to not breathing with a pulse, to pulseless. Four minutes, from alive, to dead. We worked him for all we were worth. We threw the entire drug box at him, defibrillated him from v-fib straight into asystole, and all the while, all I could see were the pictures all over the walls of his immaculate home, his beautiful family, his tattered United Steel Workers hat on his dresser, which his wife said he still wears every time he leaves the house. She tried to put it on him as we were wheeling him out, CPR in progress.

There was the young family who moved out here because the husband got a job as a laborer in the mill. They moved into a trailer park in Black Oak, because it was all they could afford, but they were saving up to buy a house, somewhere in Merrillville or Hobart or a safer part of the county, once he had finished his probation and gotten into the Union. Then, one morning, their four month-old son didn't wake up, and I had to tell them that there was nothing we could do.

Trying to let those sorts of things roll off of your shoulders is the only way to survive. Writing is cathartic for me. It's also important to remember the highlights. Holding the little old lady's hand because she's scared. Helping the elderly gentleman realize that he hasn't been using his inhaler correctly, which is why it isn't helping. Taking someone to the pharmacy on their way home from the hospital, because you know that the reason they had to go in the first place was because they're all out of their blood pressure medication. Guiding a family through an emergent intubation in the emergency department, explaining the process, and then taking their loved one to another hospital for the higher level of care, and knowing that your guidance made it tolerable, because nothing ever makes that okay. Responding, hearts pounding, to the report of "Officer Down," to arrive on scene and realize that the officer wasn't shot, or stabbed, or beaten, but that he had simply slipped in the middle of a HUGE patch of ice and couldn't get up because he couldn't get enough traction.

The good moments don't outnumber the bad ones, but they do help ease their pain. Working in a place like this, it's too easy to focus on the bad. I always try to remember the good.

Lord knows, the Steel City has more than enough of both to go around.