8. It was as slippery as I imagine shit-covered ice can be.
“Firefighter/medic here. We had a mid 50s female hoarder in my district. Obviously mental health issues come standard with serious hoarders. If you watch the A&E show you know the standard stuff (dirty clothes, garbage, rotten food, boxes of junk that creates walking paths, animal waste, etc) Of course at a certain stage of hoarding their bathroom plumbing stops working. The easy solution to that, if you’re crazy, is to use buckets and/or bowls. Being a hoarder, you don’t dump these you just fill more and more to the brim.
Still wouldn’t be that bad but this one was also an alcoholic and would end up falling and either getting wedged in one of the narrow walking paths between all the junk or just be too drunk to stand up on her own. When that happened she’d press her life alert button and summon us to her rescue.
Her kitchen was the cleanest room in the house and you could actually see a lot of the linoleum. Once she fell in there and landed on a large plastic bowl of her fermented sewage. She tried for a while to get up on her own before wanting assistance. During her attempts to get up she had knocked over another 5-gallon bucket of her special slurry.
All the normal hoarding garbage acted as the walls of the worst kiddie pool in existence. Being the medic and the least senior guy of the crew I knew I’d be the one picked to rescue this damsel in distress. I crested the mound and stepped down gingerly like I was trying to walk on thin ice. It was as slippery as I imagine shit-covered ice can be. My Captain isn’t one to leave a man on his own and joined me in the shit show.
Our princess had thrashed around in her attempts to stand and was covered head to toe like she was Arnold hiding from the Predator. We’re all just wearing our bunker pants and boots (luckily they’re waterproof), a T-shirt, and rubber gloves. We each grab a hand and have her slide her bare feet up to our boots so she has something to keep her feet in place on the slip and slide that her kitchen floor had become. We lift her up to her feet and start the journey back to her living room.
Before we cross the 6 feet to safety she slips and since she’s greased up her hand slips out of my grip. In an effort to keep herself from falling she grabs my forearm. My bare forearm with her rotten, shit-covered hand. Her grip slips and her hand slides down to my wrist. It somehow bunched up my rubber glove and squeezed some of the mixture inside my glove. I keep my feet under me but don’t recognize that blessing until later because I was distracted by how clumpy my arm hair was.
We get her out and loaded in the ambulance (wrapped her up in several layers of sheets) and use the booster line to decon as much as possible before getting back in the truck to get back to the most-needed shower I’ve ever had.
It took several more months before Adult Protective Services could get her removed and into an assisted living center. We never entered her house again without level B hazmat suits and N95 masks.”
