Frederick Burroughs wrote:
Tinkerntom wrote:

Frederick Burroughs wrote:

Here, just breath normally. There's plenty of smoke to go around.
Don't try to hold your breath. The contact buzz will still get you.
See:
http://www.user.shentel.net/riburr/p...ng070401b.html


But I don't like any smoke! In fact, I don't like anything, that
dulls
me to the wonderful feeling of being alive. If you have never died,
you
may not be familiar with the extreme delight of being alive!
Apparently
Thompson did not share that delight! Maybe to much smoke? TnT


HST(hompson), by his own count, was documented to have died sixteen
times by 2003. Unfortunately he wasn't able to perform the final
tally


Well as I have been reading the various post, and realizing, how many
times I expect I was playing tag with the grim reaper, I thought of two
particular incidents that got my attention.

The first, during College, I was driving an ambulance to pay the bills.
On one particular job, I was transporting a shell shock patient from
WW2, down to FT. Sill for treatment. Now on the way down there, there
were signs that warned you " Do Not Stop, No Parking", and "Don't drive
into the Smoke". Seems that they did tank maneuvers out there, and
would drive the big 70 ton tanks right across the road under cover of
smoke, and going hell bent for leather. Only a short time previous they
had an incident where some cars where crushed by a tank while waiting
for the smoke to clear.

Anyway as I was driving my way down to the fort hospital, there was
alot of smoke this particular trip, and my passenger was getting very
agitated, probably had something to do with flashbacks. At some point,
he worked his restraints loose, and decided he wanted to drive the
ambulance. The only thing I had going for me was I exclusivily
controlled the brake, and managed to throw the keys out the window.
Then it was katy-bar-the-door, as to who was going to drive the
ambulance. He was manaically strong is all I can say. We fought and
rolled and wrestled from one end of the ambulance to the other and
back! Hitting and scraping and biting like I had never fought. Out
there in the middle of nowhere, and all of a sudden the smoke
surrounded the ambulance so thick you could not see 10 feet out from
the window.

Then I heard the tanks going by a 50 to 70 mph. so close you could
reach out and touch them. Not that I tried, I was still to busy
fighting the dude in the back of my ambulance. He was slowly wearing
down though, and I don't know whether it was my youth or the fact that
my adrenaline meter red lined, but I finally got him back in the
wheelchair with restraints doubled, and if they were too tight, I don't
know if at that point I really cared.

I crawled out of the ambulance, with my knees knocking, and found the
keys. The whole time the tanks are still going by me, and I to this day
don't know how they missed us. I got going down the road, as soon as I
could and got out of there. Got him to the hosbital, treated or
whatever, and got him back to OKC to the VA hospital there.

Turns out, they were evaluating him to go home, after what, 30 years in
the hospital. I don't know why they had to send him 60 miles down to FT
Sill, but they did.

As I got back, and was unloading him out of the ambulance, his wife,
who had been supposedly waiting for him all those years, met us with a
shotgun. She shot him dead, point blank, right there in front of me in
my wheelchair, not a foot from where I was standing, and then shot
herself to death as well. Seems from a note we found, that she did not
want him coming home because it would mean the end of some sort of
financial support that she got as long as he was in the VA Hospital.
She figured she couldn't continue to live, so she might as well end it
all.

That was one messed up day, and the last day I drove the ambulance!
Remembering the story, I think I will have to hold off on the second,
Tnt