2022, animals, Family, home, Kids, pets, Uncategorized

Emergency 911

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Daughter was at some friends’ apartment last Friday helping them get two kittens to the vet as the friends went to a grandmother’s funeral. Both the friends were stressed. One of the kittens had walked across a hot electric stove element and burned a paw. The other kitten had blood in its stool. Both needed medical care. Daughter was going to transport the cats to the vet as soon as the friends left for the funeral.

As the trio of humans and ailing cats tried to leave the seventh floor apartment, the knob on the apartment door jammed. No amount of jiggling the knob unlodged it. The male partner phoned his brother to get ideas how to remove the knob. The brother’s advice didn’t work, either. They had to phone 911.

Three firefighters arrived, and they, too, struggled to unjam the knob. They asked hopefully if Daughter and her friends were sure that the door wasn’t bolted at the top of the door. Well, of course it wasn’t. One of the firefighters eventually removed the whole doorknob, destroying it in the process. There is now a gaping hole in the door, and it probably needs to be replaced.

Daughter and the female friend decided that the male friend’s grandmother jammed the door because she didn’t like what he was wearing to her funeral. I am relieved they didn’t have to climb out of a seventh story window and be rescued by firetruck ladders.

When have you had to phone 911? Ever needed to be rescued? Every been in an Escape Room?

36 thoughts on “Emergency 911”

  1. I have never been in an escape room. I thought those only existed for TV sitcom plots.

    Neither have I ever called 911, but I’m glad its there. However, if I were trapped in an apartment by a non-functioning doorknow, I think I’d call a locksmith or the apartment building management.

    I’m glad the fire department in the story had the time to do the necessary. It was probably more interesting than hanging around the station.

    This response reeks of my white male privilege. Even I can smell that.

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    1. Explain to me what is white or male or privileged about applying appropriate, rational sense to a problem. Doesn’t that infer that suggesting a calm rational approach is the exclusive domain of white males?
      I’m surprised that the 911 operator sent responders to a stuck doorknob problem. That means they were unavailable for a real emergency. A stuck doorknob is hardly life threatening.

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  2. I phone 911 twice. Once many years ago when something happened in the neighborhood that I can’t recall. As I was looking out the window, a police car showed up so I hung up the phone. Immediately, the phone rang again. It was the 911 dispatcher asking if I’d called. I said yes but the police were already there.

    Second time was when my MIL was at our house and recovering from some sort of surgery. It was morning, she went to the bathroom, came out shortly after, and said there was a problem. She gestured me to look in the bathroom where I saw blood all over the toilet and the floor. I called 911 and the EMTs arrived minutes later. MIL was pretty darn calm about it all. Turns out she’d had some internal bleeding from her surgery that “leaked out” all at once. I was freaked of course but the EMTs took her to the hospital and she got patched up. No harm, no foul except for a few more days in the hospital for her. Strange.

    Never needed rescuing, thank goodness. Never been in an escape room. What’s the point?

    Chris in Owatonna

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    1. I have told the story before when I drove Sandra at 70 miles an hour to Duluth the day she came home from the hospital after birth of our now 50 year old daughter. She bled like that. This was at about 2:30 a.m. I should have done something about local on call doctor who refused to come in this forcing me to Duluth.

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  3. Four times for Sandra. To ER all four times. Then I took her in on thanksgiving day about 12 years ago when she came close to death. Last time I called 911 is how she ended up in memory care. Ambulance and rescue squad and fire department people were all wonderful. As were ER staff. Rest of Mayo, very poor here. A dozen years ago when we lived across the hall I saw an old woman fall in the parking lot. Called 911. Broken hip. Too fragile to repair. Her son got angry with me. Then the time a woman had a bad reaction to a new drug and hit the back wall hard with her brand new car. We brought her to our apartment right next to garage. Result of that was we got the bill for the ambulance. Took months to resolve with threats. Thank you once again Mayo.

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  4. Are both kitties OK?

    Only 911 call was a year ago tomorrow, when Husband started listing while sitting in his chair, and I finally realized what the hell was going on – he was having a stroke!

    I have never needed rescuing (at least not that a 911 call would have helped).

    Had to look up escape room ( I must not watch enough TV, or something.) Closest I’ve come was a How to Solve a Murder dinner back in the 80s, where each dinner guest was one of the “cast”.

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  5. I have never been in an escape room, in fact, I don’t really know what it is.

    I’ve also never called 911, although there have been a couple of occasions I could have or maybe even should have. I’m thinking of the time that Mr. Tope’s clothes caught on fire in our basement, but I figured I could get him to the ER a lot faster by taking him there myself since we lived right across the street from the hospital’s ER entrance. I think husband might have called 911 when I fell in 2012.

    I agree with Aboksu and Bill, calling 911 over a stuck doorknob would have never occurred too me. One of our former baboons was in the habit of routinely calling 911 over such issues as lost car keys and not being able to find her car in the supermarket parking lot. Still makes me shake my head in disbelief.

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    1. If one were to speak of white privilege, imagining your personal inconveniences rose to the level of emergencies or expecting that 911, when summoned, would come and would be helpful, is a kind of privilege no minority would be likely to expect.

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  6. Afternoon- I’ve called 911 a few times. Medical for daughter once, once at the college for a student that has fallen off a choir riser, once when my friend Paul fell off a ladder. Seems like maybe once or twice for other things.

    There is a “non-emergency” contact number for law enforcement and I call that often. Strange cars, dumped garbage, trees down on roads, all that stuff that needs LE, but not an emergency. Course I have a few deputies cell numbers too. For township stuff.

    I have no interest in an escape room challenge.

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  7. Being rescued: I got into a wagon once and couldn’t get back out. I called my son in the house and he hasn’t let me forget about that.

    Was on the barn roof one day, and the ladder blew over. I kept working on whatever I was fixing until the vet showed up and I asked him to put the ladder back up. This was a new guy I hadn’t met before. He kinda giggled as he put the ladder back up.

    When I had a job measuring grain bins, I had ladders fall over twice. Once it was low enough to the ground I could just get down. Once I kept asking the farm dog to go get help, but he was no help. This was way before cell phones. I was finally able to get down but I was a lot younger and much more nimble.

    Once, while cutting brush, a stick went up my nose. I bled. A lot, and I had nothing with me to stop it. Again, called son and asked him to bring me some paper towels. He showed up with his whole medical emergency bag. I said “I just needed paper towels”. He said “all I heard was stick up your nose”

    I’ve rescued daughters boots from being stuck in mud. I’ve rescued a fawn that had fallen in a window well. (They scream by the way).
    Cows, calves…

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  8. There is an Escape Room in Bismarck that people pay to be locked into so they can figure out how to escape. I understand it is good for corporate team building exercises. I apologize for my absence from the Trail today. I left Howard Lake this morning at 8:00 and just arrived home.

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      2. I have taken part in some that I thought were really fun – and revealing, too. I will say this though, all of the participants have to be willing players, just one uncooperative cynic can spoil the whole thing.

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  9. I’ve been rescued a number of times when trapped in a conversation (think “cocktail party”) where I was either ill-equipped to be speaking, or just didn’t want to be talking to that person for whatever reason. Rescue might come from a friend who joins in or happens to need me elsewhere…

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    1. i was just listening to a podcast with a woman who teaches people how to leave unwanted situations by just saying no and leaving mit was a refreshing realization that it’s a viable option
      i forget the simple stuff

      called 911 numerous times when i witnessed accidents in the making
      nothin for me knock on wood

      story reminds me of the leave it to beaver episode where beaver and wally have to call gus to get puddin and benji out of the bathroom

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  10. I have the police non-emergency number in my contacts on my cell phone, and stuck on the refrigerator with a magnet. I’ve used that number several times, but never had to call 911.

    About a month ago, I was taking a walk on Raspberry Island, which is in the middle of the Mississippi. I had gone down to see where the water level was. Very high, and fast current carrying lots of logs and stuff. I was standing on the pedestrian bridge that leads out to the island, looking at a large accumulation of logs and other debris that had caught on the bridge supports. The debris stretched almost all the way across the channel on the south side of Raspberry Island. I was observing that the space between the debris pile and the docs that separate the slips on the south shore, where people dock their boats, had narrowed so that only about 10 feet remained for the water to flow through freely. I was thinking, before long a log is going to come along and lodge against one of those docks, and then the pressure of the water is going to rip the dock right off, and then the next docks downstream are going to go like dominoes. I figured maybe I should call someone, but I wasn’t sure who to call. It wasn’t really a 911 situation, but who do you call? The parks department? Department of Transportation? Finally I thought I would call the mayor’s office, which has a complaint line. I had that number in my contacts on my phone, so I started to look for it, but being in bright sunlight I was unable to see the phone clearly. So I walked under the Wabasha Street bridge, which goes over the road to the pedestrian bridge, to get into the shade. I started dialing the number. As I was standing there, I could hear traffic passing on the bridge overhead. It tends to be sort of loud – when cars and trucks go over the bridge, there’s a sort of whump WHUMP as the wheels go on to the bridge deck. So I was hearing a lot of whump WHUMP, whump WHUMP, and then it began to be more like whump WHUMP, whump CRRACK CRRRACK WHUMP CRRRACK CRRRACK, whump….and I figured either there was an accident on the bridge above me, or something was going on in the river. As the phone was connecting with the mayor’s office, I walked back to the pedestrian bridge and looked over the side. Just as I had been visualizing, the debris had reached a dock, and the whole series had given way, and the whole channel was blocked. I described the scene to the woman at the mayor’s office, and she said she would figure out who to call.

    No police showed up or anything, but someone from the St. Paul Yacht Club eventually came. I talked to her, and it appeared that responsible people were looking at the situation, so I could leave and go home. The docks have electric lines running along them, so that the boats can have shore power, so it did require some emergency attention. The last time I was down there, it was still kind of a mess – I guess they have to wait for the water to go down and then get a barge to come in and remove the debris, and then they can repair the docks.

    Some excitement on a random Wednesday morning.

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  11. Four times. Three for accidents that I either Witnessed or came across right after they happened. All people needing some immediate care that I couldn’t provide other than maybe a clean dish cloth or towel that I had in the back of my car.

    The interesting one was when YA was about four. She and her friend from down the street were playing upstairs and I was watching television downstairs. The phone rang and when I picked it up the voice on the other end said “This is 911. Do you have an emergency?” Turns out the girls had called 911 from upstairs. I taught YA about 911 when she was three so I knew she was capable but apparently the impetus for the call came from the friend, who confessed to her folks after I sent her home.

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  12. A few years ago a sheriff squad car came down to our place. I figured it was one of the guys I know and was getting my shoes on, when he came running to the door. “You called 911?” He said. Uh, no. He kinda stopped and said well someone had called 911. They just said someone wasn’t breathing. And all they had for an address was our road.
    Another deputy and an ambulance showed up and they tried to figure out what was going on.
    Kelly was coming home and her panic rose as she watched deputies turn down our road.

    Turns out two young men were trespassing on an abandoned farm, one of them climbed an electric pole to steal some Copper wire, and electrocuted himself and fell off the pole. The friend called 911, dropped the phone and ran off.
    Because it was late summer, the grass was so tall, the victim wasn’t found for an hour.

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      1. Sadly, no. Electric power to the property was removed by the coop almost immediately. The farmstead was completely razed a few years later.

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