Little Pink House_ A True Story of Defiance and Courage - Jeff Benedict [3]
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GIMME SHELTER
Spring 1997
Medic Eleven, come in.”
Forty-year-old EMT Susette Kelo grabbed the paramedic truck’s radio receiver. “This is Medic Eleven.”
“Respond to a man down at First Avenue and Niantic River Road.”
Susette’s partner, Jeff Douchette, whipped the wheel around and headed toward Niantic Bay, an inlet off Long Island Sound in southeastern Connecticut.
“Medic Eleven en route,” Susette said.
Married with five sons, Susette Kelo had become an EMT a few years earlier, after a drunk driver crashed head-on into her seventeen-year-old son’s vehicle, nearly killing him. Paramedics had helped save her boy’s life. Susette had begun volunteering on ambulance runs as a way of giving back.
The experience ultimately convinced her to become a medic. Emergency response offered Susette an escape from her unfulfilling home life in Preston, a small farming community twenty miles from the Connecticut coast. Susette and her husband, John Jorsz, had a ranch house, a barn, and farm animals on four acres. It had been a great place to raise boys. But now all of them except her youngest lived on their own. And with high school graduation approaching, he would soon be gone as well.
She was thinking about moving on, too. Her marriage had soured, the relationship reduced to constant bickering. She felt like her husband showed more affection for the bottle than for her. He felt like she didn’t appreciate how hard he worked to provide for them. But it didn’t matter who was right; the romance was drained. And with the kids gone and the animals sold, the ranch felt empty and cold.
Susette knew she needed a change in scenery when the highlight of her week had become weekend EMT shifts. Most calls took her to waterfront communities on Long Island Sound. The water had a way of brightening her day.
“There he is,” Douchette said, pulling up beside an elderly man sitting on a sidewalk curb, his feet resting on the street. Sweat saturated his shirt. An elderly woman and some pedestrians huddled around him.
“Grab the monitor,” Douchette said.
With the summer temperature pushing eighty-five degrees, Susette had her long red hair pinned up in a French twist. Her form-fitting, navy blue uniform stuck to her tall, slender figure as she grabbed an oxygen bag, a heart monitor, and the drug box from the truck. But even while doing this she couldn’t help noticing the attractive beach cottages lining the avenues along the water.
“Boy, it’s beautiful down here,” she said to her partner.
He headed straight for the patient, whose wife explained that they had been out for their routine morning walk and her husband had collapsed with chest pains. The man labored to breathe.
Susette gave him oxygen and applied cardiac-monitor cables to him while Douchette checked his vital signs. She saw fear in the elderly couple’s eyes as an ambulance arrived.
“You were probably overcome by the heat,” Douchette told the man, reassuring him that he would be okay. “But just to be safe, we’re going to bring you to the hospital. And I’m going to go with you.”
Susette helped the patient onto a stretcher before packing the equipment back in her truck and taking the keys from Douchette, who climbed into the ambulance. “I’ll meet you back at the hospital,” he told her.
Pulling away, Susette spotted a house with a private dock, a small patch of beach, and a “For Sale” sign. That afternoon, when her shift ended, she returned to the scene to get the Realtor’s name and phone number off the sign and take a closer look at the house. The setting sun put a sparkle on the ocean water that lapped up to the property’s sandy shoreline.
I really have to move down here, she thought.
For more than a year, Susette had been trying to talk her husband into selling the ranch and moving closer to the water, convinced she could cope with an unfulfilling marriage if she had the