If you called 911 in Pawtucket, and C-Shift was working, chances are you were transported to the hospital by either Dick Lemay or Dave Tomlinson. They manned both rescues on C-Shift for thirty years. Tomlinson is a barrel-chested man with a sense of humor only obtained by witnessing the ups and downs of life on the squad. His catch phrase was "No Stress EMS." I was his last partner before he retired, and, true to his moniker, never once saw him flustered or overwhelmed. After retirement, he took a job dispatching in the Alarm Room, and this is where the interview was conducted. This is just an excerpt.
TT- So you had a shaken baby syndrome? DT- Shaken Baby Syndrome. He said he rolled over on the baby, when in fact, when they got her to the hospital, they ran CAT scans, brain scans, and she actually had Shaken Baby Syndrome. But he met us in the middle of the street all concerned and everything, saying, "My baby, my baby, my baby"--he gave her to me. (it was actually his girlfriend's baby). We did what we had to, got her to the hospital. TT- Awful. So she was dead? DT- She was dead. When he handed her to me, she was dead. One of many... TT- Why don't we go to the beginning. What year did you get on? DT- 1984. I was first assigned to Fire Alarm. TT- How old were you? DT- I was 25. TT- What did you do before you got here? DT- I was a French gourmet chef... TT- Really? DT- I went to the Rhode Island School of Design. And I worked in the restaurant business for 8 years. TT- 8 years and then you got on here. DT- Got on here. I won the lottery. TT- (laughs) Now I know your family was big in the police (department). What made you choose fire? DT- I had too many bad habits (laughing.) I'm kidding. I never wanted to be a police officer, I wanted to be a Gage and Desoto guy. TT- Right? DT- You know, from "Emergency?" That's what I wanted to be. TT- When you first got on, I think that's when Rescue 2 started in service, right? DT- '82 I think. When I got on in '84, I was in Fire Alarm for six months, which in that six month span, my sister was killed in the line of duty as a police officer. And I received the phone call in Fire Alarm that night. TT- Wow. I was gonna get to that-- DT- Oh, I'm sorry. TT- Well, now that we're there, um, when Lemay started talking about it, you could tell he didn't really enjoy, you know, (re-telling) the story, because I had never heard it. And when he told me that you were the one that dispatched him on the run, you know, he just-- DT- I knew it was her. She had given me a ride to work that night. TT- Now your sister was a patrolman on the Pawtucket Police, brand new, right? DT- Six months on the job. Her first six months was spent--because she looked so young--in Cumberland High School as an undercover student. They had a big drug problem in Cumberland High School, and her first night back on the line, she went into work that night and was told she had to be in dispatch. She bitched a little bit about it and there was a new officer at the time, Kenny Provost, he said, "I'll go in dispatch and you go on the road." So they switched. She came up to my house, she gave me a ride to work that night, and when the call came in that it was on Power Road, and I said, "That's my sister's division." So I took the call for an Officer Down, I had to call my father who was the Chief of Police, tell him to get to the hospital right away because my sister was not in good shape. There was a priest on the scene and he said she sat up. What happened was she spun out--they were resurfacing the road--she spun out on a patch of dirt, hit the leg of a backhoe, the backhoe spun her into a telephone pole. She had no other injuries except head trauma. Six days later she died at Mass General. TT- Lemay said the same thing. Said there wasn't a mark on her. DT- Nope, just a little glass on her face. The priest said that she sat up, brushed the glass off her face, and then just went unconscious. TT- How old was she? DT- 22. TT- And you what? DT- 25. TT- And what about other policemen? DT- I had my brother, he did 20 years on the police department and retired a detective sergeant. And my father, who went through the ranks. Got on in 1957 and ended up being the Chief of Police until somewhere around 1993. TT- Right on. Now as far as your career path, after Fire Alarm where did you go? DT- I did two months up at Station 5, and in that two month span, Captain Lemay's baby passed away. So I was always getting transferred to the rescue. And in those days you did a three cycle transfer, than you had to come back (to your own truck) for a cycle in your station, and then you could go back out. So every four weeks I was getting sent out, so eventually I decided to just stay on the rescue, because I was always there. And then there was a low point in like, '85, where we had no rescue lieutenants, and nobody wanted to be on the rescue, so I took a permanent transfer to Rescue 2. And for the rest of my career I was on the rescue, for the next 28 years and 9 months. TT- You were on Rescue 2 C-shift for the whole shot. DT- The whole shot. Yep. TT- Lemay said the same thing. "I was on Rescue 1 C-shift the whole time." DT- It was Dick and I. I was Dick's partner for like three years, I think, as a private, and that's when I took a permanent transfer over to Rescue 2. And I drove Dick Lemay crazy as his partner. (Laughs) Because I'm sure Dick Lemay never told you that we had to a couple of times push the rescue out the door because I left the batteries on in the truck, and we'd go out for a run and the truck would be dead (laughs). And he would run and get the jumper cables, going, "Davey, Davey, Davey." I ran out of gas on the rescue one time because--right in front of Station 3-- because I wasn't paying attention to the gas gauge.. (laughs) You know, these are the fun times, you know, but he kept shaking his head, "Davey, Davey, Davey." (laughs). But we both worked side by side--you know, he was on one rescue and I was on the other, for some twenty-something years, and it worked out perfect. TT- Now in that time, I mean, uh, you saw a lot of people coming and going, cause nobody stays on the rescue. DT- Nobody stays on the rescue. TT- So you, Artie, Lemay--guys who were doing two decades, three decades, I mean that's-- DT- It was a lot of work. It was trying work, because you knew everytime the bell rang it was either you or the other rescue going out. And you would lay in bed praying, "Let it be the other rescue. Please let it be Rescue 1." (laughs) But most of the time you were going. You always got the rookies on the job all the time, and you would try to tell them, "Maybe this isn't the job for you. If it is, hey, stay. If it's not, don't feel bad about moving on, you know?" So I had my share of partners. TT- Let's get into that. There's no worse place than being stuck on a truck with somebody that doesn't want to be there, isn't good at what they're doing, you know, it's a nightmare. DT- It is. TT- Because you're just basically carrying them. DT- Well, yeah. I would just try to tell people, "Listen, I am very competent in my job, I need you to make sure what I need on the truck is on the truck. That's basically your job. Make sure the product's there, the drugs we need, the supplies we need." I said, "I'm not going to come down on you," I was very low stress EMS guy, you know? Guys liked to work for me. I never got excited but if something's not there, I get mad. And I taught. Did a lot of teaching. And the people that were go-getters, then I would let them do the job, you know? I don't have to run the ship myself, you know? You want to intubate, start IVs, you're welcome to it. The more you know, the better off you are. The more secure you are in your job, the less afraid you are of your job. And the big theory was, when in doubt, drive faster for the hospital. (laughs) DT- When in doubt drive faster. (laughs) TT- It's close enough, let's just get there. Um, when you hear about the changes, now that you're off the line, and you hear how things are changing--everything's computers, reports and PTS's, and now we're on scene doing CPR for thirty minutes, it's almost like they're turning the rescue into a clerical position, with all of the -- DT- Yes. In the old days it was like "Treat and Street." If you could fix somebody on the scene and send them on their way, that's fine. Nowadays, every person is money. So they want you to do as much as you can to make your money up. You know, um, I think on-scene time for 30 minutes doing CPR is crazy. You're three minutes from the hospital, in my district you were three minutes, five minutes tops, from the hospital. So to do an on-scene CPR, whatever, for 30 minutes... 12 lead EKGs, now they're the big thing, it's very hard to get a 12 Lead EKG in a truck that's vibrating, you know? And you're trying to tell the patient to sit still, you're on a gurney in the back of a truck, with the truck running, guys coming in and out of the back of the truck...it's hard to get a good reading. And it's a waste of time, because when you get to the hospital the first thing they do is put him on a 12 Lead EKG. A lot of times, the nurses at the hospital just want to know what shape the patient is in--alive, dead, pulse, no pulse, CPR--a lot of times that's all they need to know. They don't need all the intricacies. You can give it to them afterwards. TT- I've noticed it too. These (rescue) guys have to be more concerned with documenting all the stuff that's got to get done instead of patient care. DT- Right, yes. TT- It seems that's what we're losing a little bit. It's almost like you need three guys on the recue now. DT- Well, in the old days, if you were going on a run for--I don't know--say you're delivering a baby, or mass trauma or something--on the way to your run you were thinking about that run, what you're gonna need when you get out of the truck, what supplies you're gonna need--nowadays, as soon as they get in the truck they're starting to type on the computer. Name, address... TT- Crazy. DT- That's crazy, you know? You can do that later. I'm glad I got off before they started that. Because that, to me, is a waste of time. Not a waste of time, because I'm sure they need it for stats and numbers and--that's what the city sold us on, anyways, we never seem to get the benefit of all that stats and numbers, you know? 15 years I fought for a third rescue and they got it two years after I retired. (laughs) The rescues were getting hammered doing like 5000, 5500 runs a year, and you were getting no support from the city. They were taking your money (city's bill residents for 911 Rescue services, but not fire services), the clerical work you were doing was making the city money, but you weren't really receiving the benefits of that money. That got kind of depressing. And not getting total support from the firefighters on the job because they wanted fire equipment, they didn't really care about the rescue. The guys on the rescue were kind of like on an island on their own. It was kind of, it let you down a little bit. But you couldn't let it affect your job. Everyday you came to work. I worked 30 years on the rescue, I never hated my job one time. TT- Right? DT- I might not have wanted to come to work at night, but I never hated it once I got here. TT- The rescue is an island. Those guys are almost, when you see them in the station, they're not sleeping right, they eat when they can, they're dealing with themselves mostly because they are pretty much isolated. DT- They're isolated. It's nice to know that 90% of our guys have been on rescue and can help you out on scene. It's nice to know you have that back up, but you are isolated. TT- You stayed on the EMS side so long because you liked being out there, on the streets... DT- I kind of liked to know I made a little bit of a difference. TT- Waiting around a station would've driven you crazy. DT- It did drive me crazy. I went from working 100 hours a week in a restaurant...I liked the busyness of the rescue. I always liked to know that I was going to something major that happened--whether it's a rollover on the highway--which is what you live for. Rescue guys live for that. Mass trauma, gunshots, whatever, hangings--rescue guys live for that. They don't like the 75 year old woman that can't breathe. You gotta give her an Albuterol treatment, start an IV--that gets boring after a while. We happen to live in the area of the S-curves in Rhode Island. In my career I probably went to a hundred accidents in the S-curves. And some of them were major accidents. TT- We can talk about that too. The fact that they bent the highway to accommodate certain interests... DT- Yes. And it's a dangerous part of highway. They resurfaced it with the wrong Macadam so it's like an ice rink. If there's a mist on that part of the highway, it's like an ice rink. I've seen cars come around the corner and smash into the fire truck that's blocking for the rescue. Total the fire truck. I've seen cars come around the corner with the cops five cars back, and a car coming around the corner almost kills the cop because he slid into the cop car. There's just been accident after accident on that stretch of highway. TT- Chaos. They did that (bent the highway into the S-curves) in the 1950's and they're still paying for it 60 years later. DT- Right. TT- So, I'm assuming anything kid related is awful. DT- Kids aren't supposed to die. Babies aren't supposed to die. I hated baby runs. If there was any run I didn't like, it was baby runs. But you're not allowed to pick and choose. You have to go. Whether you're going to a family that's yelling "Save my baby, save my baby" and you know there's no way to save that baby, but you do your best, you try to remove that baby from that situation for the comfort of the family. And it's sad, because you have to see the family go through hell. And there's nothing you can do. You can try to comfort them but there really isn't anything you can do. TT-How many babies did you deliver? DT- Eight. TT- You and Lemay. He had nine. DT- I had 8. I had--one of my favorite stories is, a Portuguese girl on her knees in the bathroom, with a head sticking out of her vagina, and I'm saying, "Okay, mam, we're gonna turn over now and have this baby," and the girl's mother, who only speaks Portuguese, is going, "Maria! Maria! How you not know you pregnant?" And I'm saying, "Mam, by this head right here, I'm pretty sure she's pregnant. And it's time to deliver this baby." (laughs) Another one, the engine got there before us, and they're walking this girl down, and the only reason this baby didn't hit the ground is because the baby got delivered into her sweatpants. (laughs) A third-floor apartment, an open stair way, in zero degree weather. TT- Wow, that's a mess. DT- That's a mess. I had people telling me, "Oh it's not time for this baby, we're not in the third term yet." And I, you tell people, "You can take all the terms you want, but this baby's gonna be delivered right now, so I wish you would move some of your other children away from the area, you know?" TT- It's gonna get messy. DT- It's gonna get messy. I delivered one on the third floor with Engine 2, with Captain Cordeiro. We get in the house, and the sack was out with the head in it, and we had to cut--there was six or seven kids around, all watching this--we were asking them, "Please move the children out of the kitchen," because when we cut the sack, all the fluid, she broke her water and it went everywhere, and these people, like just wanted all these kids to watch this stuff. This is not stuff you should be watching. Not yet, you know (laughs). TT- It's like a live TV show. DT- It is. A couple on beds, a couple in the back of the rescue. I got an accommodation one time from the Governor's office for somebody related to him. We had a breach baby. And we actually delivered the breach baby in the back of the rescue, which is very dangerous. TT- Oh my God. DT- The lady had no choice. That was very very difficult. We got accommodations for that, me and Norman Pike. TT- Smoking Joe Pike! DT- Smoking Joe, you know. TT- Now as far as--those are good baby stories. The bad baby stories are bad enough. DT- Bad baby stories are bad. You try not to think about them too much, because they're the only ones that bother you. TT- I remember once a lady running out with the kid in her arms and the kid was blue. I remember the whole thing. It was awful. DT- It's awful. We had a fire over on Magill Street, it was an 8 year old kid. The mother was mentally challenged. She left the kid in the house with a space heater. The space heater tipped over, the place was roaring when she came back. She got burnt. Somebody handed the child out to (Battalion Chief) Meerbott, he handed me the baby. I started an IV, and when I went to snap the tourniquet, the tourniquet melted on the kid's arm. That's how hot he was. That's the worse burned child I've seen. I've seen adults where you grab their shoulder and you pull the meat off their shoulder. That was one of my first fires. On West Avenue. And you have to, like my wife called me hard. I'm not hard, it's just if you take everything to heart you're not gonna make it in that field. You're not. TT- Now, you never took it home with you. You never turned into an alcoholic, you never divorced your wife...you were able to-- DT- Sometimes you wonder why. You know? Sometimes you wonder why it doesn't bother you more. But it's just, you're trained. You have to be hard. You have to be able to go back and eat your dinner after you get someone hit by a train. I had multiple train hits. But you have to learn to shake it off or it will eat you up. And you won't last. Like I always said, "Low Stress EMS." You have to push it off. And I was good at that, I guess. But you have to wonder why I was good at that. Why didn't it bother me? TT- Lemay was talking about the cocaine 80's, and just the sheer amount of violence, that it was unbelievable. DT- I don't know if he told you about a run we had, a guy's girlfriend stole a kilo of coke from some dealers. You know where the car wash is on Main Street? TT- Yes. DT- We come out of Sayles Avenue, turn right, and there's a guy laying in the middle of the street, in the fetal position, and we roll him over and blood is just squirting out of his carotid artery. A car from New York came up, saw him walking down the street, shot him in the neck, and it was retaliation for his girlfriend stealing the kilo of coke. We get to the emergency room, the doctor sticks his finger in the hole, in the side of his neck, says, "Oh, there's a fractured vertebrae," and he didn't make it. But that's the violence they had back then. People would just shoot you. Dick Lemay stood on top of a guy that was shooting people with a machine gun. Main Street. And Dick Lemay's standing on top of him. (laughs) Now that's ballsy. I don't know if I would've done that (laughs). That's ballsy for Lemay to be doing that, and I give him all the credit in the world for doing that, but as I said, "I'm glad I wasn't your partner that night." (laughs) TT- Catch you on the next shift, right? (laughs) DT- There was a run going down Weeden Street. There was a guy, smoking crack cocaine, he was going down Weeden Street punching out windows. Just going down the street. So the cops start chasing him, he punches out a window, dives in the house. There's an old lady and old man watching TV. So we pull up on the scene and the kid's hiding in one of the rooms and he's got knives. Every time he jumped out to see the cops he's got knives to his throat saying he's gonna do it. So I come up with this great idea, because there were way too many guns drawn around the house. There was Lincoln, Central Falls, and Pawtucket around the house. Everybody has their guns drawn. So I go, "Hey listen. Let's bring Engine 2 down here, we'll get a 2 1/2 (inch hose) out, and the next time that guy shows his face, just blast him with the 2 1/2. Right? And that's what they did. TT- (laughs) No way. DT- They come down, Moreau, Tanguay. But the lieutenant overslept. He didn't make the run. (laughs) So the guy sticks his head out, Kenny Moreau opens up on the guy, blasts him against the wall, and he held it on him until the guy dropped the knives. Cops went in there, bang, bang, bang, bang, (not gunshots, mimics a fight) and they bring him out to the rescue, where I treated him. But I'm sitting there going, "This poor family. Just sitting watching TV and some guy busts into the house, the fire department comes, puts 500 gallons of water in the house, and says, "See ya later." TT- Enjoy your night. DT- Enjoy your night. The guy wakes up in the back of the truck and asks me for water. "Hey you have any water, I'm thirsty." "Water? You just got 500 gallons worth of water." That same guy later got caught going down chimneys. He got caught in a chimney breaking into a house. TT- Lemay said that by the end of the 80's the cocaine madness kind of died down. DT- It died down but then the heroin picked up. The heroin--that Burger King on Cedar Street was the big heroin pick up spot. So guys would pick up their heroin, shoot up in the parking lot, and then by the time they crossed over the highway to get back on 95 North they'd be fucked up. I had a couple of cars stuck on the highway. Just in the lanes stopped. Unconscious, needle, ten packs of heroin on the frontseat. I had a lady unconscious in the Dunkin Donuts bathroom on Armistice Boulevard. I go in, there's a guy running out the door with a lady's pocketbook. So come to realize, he thought whatever heroin they had left was in the pocketbook, but it wasn't. It was in her pants. So we woke her up, got 10, 12 packs of heroin out of her pocket, go to the hospital, and now I'm trying to get rid of it. I don't want to be responsible for this, couldn't get rid of it. The hospital didn't want it, the police didn't want it. So I'm like, "Am I supposed to keep these ten packs of heroin?" The hospital finally took it. TT- The heroin, compared to now, because Lemay was saying he pushed more Narcan in the last two or three years of his career than he did in the previous twenty years. DT-That's because heroin's so cheap right now. You can buy a bag of heroin for five-ten dollars. It's very cheap and it's very pure. So you don't need to shoot it. You can smoke it, you can snort it, so it's very easy to--what people don't know is how addicting it is. It just totally destroys your life. TT- Destroys everything. By the time you're done with it, it's fucking done with you. DT- Yeah. You're right. TT- One thing I've found most intriguing about the job, because I didn't really know what fire departments did until I got here, but really we're just a mop cleaning up the messes people make. DT- That's it. You're the Zamboni. Obviously, you know there's the crappy calls. "Oh, I've had a headache for three weeks." It's four o'clock in the morning and now they want to go to the hospital. "Oh, I stubbed my toe last night. Take me out of bed so I can go to the bathroom." You know, those are not our runs, but you still have to go in there with the same nice attitude and be nice. As much as you want to come out and just tell them what you feel, you can't. As I was told by one Battalion Chief, "The rescue is our PR. And you do a lot of work for us." But you don't get the credit. TT- When I was your partner, I never saw you upset with anybody. I don't think I ever saw, especially in the middle of the night, you never showed it. DT- It's your job. And I used to tell my partners,, "Listen, if you don't like this, you're only here because you have to be. The first chance you get, you're very welcome to stay, but you can go. And I had a lot of good partners. I had Scooter for eight years. Mike Callahan, who ended up being a captain, he was my partner for four or five years. But they had different ambitions, they wanted to move on and do different things, you know? And I used to say, "Don't stay just because you want to be my partner. Just move on." And you're the one who forced me off the rescue... (meaning me) (Laughs). My last day on the job you got me into an accident. (laughs). TT- That's all rumors. I think we were together for six months before you retired. And after twenty-eight years, how old were you when you left? DT- I was fifty-four I think. TT- What was it like leaving? Were you ready? DT- You always think you're ready. I left more because my wife had an illness, there was no contract, I couldn't afford to take another hit in health care coverage, and it probably would've benefited me to stay longer, because I could've retired at a seventy percent pension instead of a sixty, but at the time I had to make the choice I thought was right for me. Am I sorry that I left? No, because I think it was time. And it's a young man's job. As you know, there's a lot of carrying, a lot of fighting, a lot of arguing, crazy people are tough. There's a lot of crazy people out there. When you have to take down a manic person, because you've talked to him and talked to him and no matter what you say it's not registering. And then eventually you say, "Enough talking. Now we have to take him down." And that's a lot of work. Rescue guys get beat up quite a bit. I never did, never personally, because I always used to tell them, "Someone's gonna get hurt and it's not gonna be me." But being a rescue dude is also a lot of fun. You meet a lot of new people. TT- You're in and out of hospitals all day-- DT- All day, so you start to earn the trust of the doctors. Where the doctors, if you say something, they're gonna believe you. After so many years, if you tell someone I'm coming in and I need trauma, stat, that they're gonna have that room ready for you, they believe you. And because we work so closely with the hospitals, you get to do things that you don't usually do on the rescue. Like I've done open heart massage. Actually, it was a patient I brought into the hospital. Me and Dave Boisclair. He was transferred to the rescue. We used to call him Dr. Death because everything bad happened when he worked with us. If anything bad was gonna happen, Dave was on the rescue. So it was in the middle of winter, over on Bagley Street and Pine Street, there's a little mill back there. And somebody found a man down back there, so we get out, walk over there, it's the middle of winter, we say, "He's frozen." I gave him a little nudge with my foot and all of a sudden his fingers started moving. And we're like, "Oh God." So we get him in the back of the rescue and we start stripping him down and see he's been stabbed seven times. The guy had just gotten paid, (he was) one of the drunks, and they robbed him, stabbed him up, and threw him in the Blackstone River. He made it out and made it to Bagley Street. He coded and we brought him to the hospital, and one of the doctors, an O.R. doctor (surgeon), just happened to be in the Emergency Room, and they cracked his chest open right there. He says, "You ever do open heart massage?" I says, "No." "Well, today's your lucky day." So I stuck my hand in there and--the guy had a hole right through his heart, the doctor was stitching up the heart as I was squeezing it. He's going, "Squeeze, squeeze." And that's something you never forget. That guy lived. TT-As a partner, how was my driving? DT- You scared me every single day. (laughs)
2 Comments
Mary Fernandes
9/21/2017 02:06:11 pm
I am a ER nurse and worked with Dave for years. He was a great rescue Lt. He was always professional and took great care of his pt. It was a honor and a privilege to work with him. Best of luck to him
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Mary Fernandes
9/23/2017 04:42:48 am
Thanks Mary. I was partners with Dave and Mike Dawson, so I got lucky. Hope you are well. All the best
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AuthorTom Trabulsi was born in the Midwest, attended high school in Rhode Island, and graduated from Boston University with a degree in American History. He was a bike courier in Boston and New York City, worked construction in the mountain west and east coast, and is currently a firefighter in a northeast city. Archives
August 2022
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