looniest tales of the sick & twisted

disturbed, deformed and dangerous

Scardino began filling out his paperwork and took Hank’s vital signs, which were normal. Then he was ready to look at Hank’s ankle, to see if they would need a splint or if Hank could just walk it off.

But when Scardino lifted Hank’s pant leg to look at his ankle, he saw that Hank’s foot was, basically, off. “Not completely off. It is held on by the thinnest pedicle. Even so, it is essentially amputated,” Scardino writes.“There’s almost no blood. He’s in almost no pain. He has no idea what has happened. Jesus, he wants to know how it looks. What am I supposed to tell him.”

“We’re going to have to put a splint on this, Hank,” he said. “Is it broken?” Hank asked. “Yes, it’s broken,” Scardino replied, leaving the horrible truth for the ER doctor to share with him. S CARDINO writes that working on the ambulance, seeing misery and death at every turn, took its toll. His grades suffered, his drinking increased and he changed his mind about a career in medicine, eventually going into advertising.

While he certainly saved lives and helped people along the way, the job was too heavily geared toward misery for him.

He recalled a man he found dead who had apparently been lying on his couch and had fallen onto the floor on his left side. It had clearly been awhile since he died, and he was just being discovered now.

“He had no left side,” Scardino writes. “What had been his left side had grown into the carpet.”

Another time, he was called to a multicar, multiple-fatality crash in a hilly area hard to reach by a conventional vehicle. After surveying the corpse-filled scene, he and his partner found a woman who was unconscious and severely injured but alive. They were about to lift her onto a stretcher when two firemen — who had jurisdiction at the site — usurped their effort, claiming that stretcher for another body instead. A body that, Scardino saw, was obviously not alive.

The firemen, though, who were charged with making a split-second decision, believed he was. So Scardino and his partner had to race the obvious corpse to the hospital while a woman who might have been saved was left behind. Scardino never heard what happened to her. Once he was off a case, he rarely learned the result. Once he was done with a patient, he was on to the next one.

Scardino witnessed every facet of human tragedy. He saw every possible way a human body could be mangled or distorted. He saw a woman at the precise moment her life fell apart and she realized she was homeless, and saw a man lose his leg due to the careless way a thoughtful neighbor had patched him up.

By the end of four summers plus various shifts on breaks and holidays, Scardino was done. He said goodbye to the ambulance in January 1971 and was finished with medicine forever.

In the end, outside of helping him pay for school, he took no benefit from the experience, saying it left him more fearful and pessimistic about the world.

“What do I have to show for it . . . all the grief and the lost sleep and the isolation and the tears. All the horror,” he writes.

“Did it make me understand more about life, other than how bad it could be? How could it? If anything, life is more an enigma to me now than I ever imagined it could be.”