We responded to a call from a church social worker about an unresponsive individual. When we arrived on the scene we found an older man on the floor. The social worker explained that they had basically given up on life after their wife died and she would check up on him from time to time since he stopped taking care of himself. He looked like a hermit, long unkempt beard/hair, long finger/ toe nails and generally just not a pleasant sight or smell and with something moving around in his hair. This was pre AIDS so rubber gloves were on the ambulance, but no one was in the habit of carrying them yet. Now I have touched many gross things including dead bodies before this, but after moving him onto the stretcher and into the ambulance I had an over whelming need to go back into the house and wash my hands (hand sanitizers weren’t a thing yet). This one had truly grossed me out.

Had another call; with a person in a similar situation. We had to get the police to place them into protective custody so we could take them to the hospital, since they were refusing care and it was an apparent stroke. When the officer approached the house; they ass(u)med from the smell coming out of it and wanted to know how long our patient had been dead. We advised him, that’s the problem, they’re not. In this case it was the officer who was grossed out. By this point, I had learned my lesson and had rubber gloves on my person for every call.

When I started working on ambulances, rubber gloves were on board because the state said we had to have them. They were mostly used to entertain children en route to the hospital. Then AIDS arrived on the scene. By the time I stopped working on ambulances, I would have gloves in my pants pocket, shirt pocket, coat pockets and anywhere else I could think of. Plus the ambulance had an assortment as opposed to the one size fits all prior to AIDS. But I still made glove animals for the kids. Also I recently found my old uniform jacket that I hadn’t worn since 1992 and it had rubber gloves in both the pockets.