May 3, 2022

"Guess who made the front of the paper, bitches?!" Yang then showed Penny and a few of the other firefighters at the firehouse doing a duty crew shift during the morning. On the front of the newspaper was a picture of Yang handing the infant fire victim from yesterday to Weiss. "Best part is is that the baby's still alive!"

"Not bad, not bad," Penny replied as she read the article printed on the front page. "Somebody got a video of it, and it's going viral." She then showed her and the other firefighters around them a video on her cellphone of the rescue. "100,000 hits and counting. Weiss doesn't really need the fame, but you're famous, Yang, and in a good way, this time."

"Yeah," she told her as she set the paper down. "You know, Penny, it seems like those kind of calls get so much tougher when you have a kid of your own. The whole time when I was pulling the baby out, I kept picturing Michael. Every time I looked at the baby, it was Michael. Every time."

Suddenly, their conversation was interrupted by a paid firefighter rushing into the rec room, shoring for Yang. "Xiao Long! Get out here! There's an emergency!" He was clearly somewhat panicked, indicating something was seriously wrong.

Yang and Penny looked at each other and then stood up, rushing out to the apparatus bay to see what was going on. As soon as they ran out, Yang saw what the emergency was and gasped in horror. "George! Oh my God! What's wrong with Michael?!" Her husband was holding their baby in his arms, and was clearly frightened. The baby was crying and gasping for air in his arms.

"He's burning up," George told her as he showed her the baby. "I got a temperature of 101 Fahrenheit, and his breathing's rapid! I think it could be bronchiolitis, 'cause he's wheezing too!" His mind was racing back and forth as his concern for his son grew.

Yang burst into tears as she held the baby in her arms, which was still crying from the pain of the possible infection. "There, there, Mike, stay calm, mommy and daddy are gonna get you help." She then turned to the paid firefighter. "Get Ambulance 201 ready. We're going to the hospital, now."

...

Three hours later, Yang conversed with a doctor outside of the room her son was staying in. Thankfully, it was not a serious condition, and it was only a fever. "Your son is doing well. It was just a fever from a minor sickness."

"Thank God," she replied, wiping her forehead of sweat in relief. "I guess we were just worried new parents, is all." She then nervously laughed, trying to soothe her own worries. "It's odd, doc. I've dealt with death and injury plenty of times, but I never reacted like this."

"Believe me," the doctor assured her. "As a parent myself, you'll always get more worried when it's your own kids, especially if you're a new parent. I'm sure your parents were the same."

"My dad sure was," she remarked to him. "My mom can still be." She then nodded to herself, remembering some of the times Taiyang had seemingly been overprotective when she was much younger. "Anyway, thank you again for your assistance. I'm used to bringing patients to you, but never in these circumstances. Say, speaking of that, I didn't get any updates on that little girl we brought in yesterday. How is she?"

"Oh yeah," the doctor replied as he remembered Yang's name from the newspaper. "You and Weiss Schnee rescued that little girl we received yesterday. Now I remember. Well, she's still alive, but she's still in pretty bad shape. That's about all I can tell you, sadly."

"As long as she's still alive," Yang told him, patting him on the shoulder. "As long as she's still alive. Any word on anyone else from the fire?"

"Nobody's dead," the doctor confirmed with her, making her feel even more accomplished. "They're all still alive as of today."

Then, out of a room next door, a nurse ran out and yelled to both of them, "My patient just went into cardiac arrest!"

The doctor looked to Yang and commanded her, "Come with me." The three of them then ran into the room, where a man in his 60s was laying on a hospital bed in full cardiac arrest. His monitor was beeping loudly and was displaying ventricular fibrillation as Yang immediately began ripping the hospital gown off the top of the man where defibrillator pads would have to go before she started doing CPR. "Mrs. Owenfield, keep doing CPR while me and the nurse get the defibrillator going! He's in v-fib!"

"You got it," Yang replied as she kept pumping into the man's chest. After 30 compressions, she was handed a bag valve mask and an oropharyngeal airway. She then inserted the OPA into the man's mouth and gave him two breaths by squeezing the BVM.

She then continued compressions another 30 times before the doctor told her, "Hold up! We're gonna shock him!" As another doctor and another nurse ran in, he declared, "Everybody clear!" Then, he applied a shock to the patient. After a short pause, he told Yang, "Continue!"

"Got it," Yang replied as she began CPR again as two more nurses ran in. After another round of compressions and breaths, she rotated out with a nurse and stood back, wiping sweat off of her forehead. "Damn, that kicked my ass. Maybe I need to head to the gym more often." She then was handed a paper towel by a nurse, which she uses to wipe her forehead more. "Thanks."

...

Later that day, Weiss was just getting out of a teleconference at her home with SDC executives while Jaune was at work at Signal Academy when the pager rang at her desk. It was for an EMS call, so initially, she paid little mind to it. However, when the response code was given as well as the address, her eyes widened. "Oh shit!" She immediately got up and ripped her business suit coat and tie off as she ran down to the garage of her home. Once there, she hopped in Car 5 and turned it on, barely having enough time to open the garage door. She radioed in just after the dispatcher informed units on District 2 Dispatch, "Fire Alarm, Car 5 is on the air, going to that cardiac arrest!"

The reason for the rapid response? The call was at the residence of 5th Lieutenant May Greenwald the company, and it was for most likely her wife, as the call came in for a 37-year-old female in cardiac arrest. Soon after she called en route, a paid firefighter called off with, "Ambulance 201's en route!"

About two and a half minutes after the call came in, Weiss pulled up to May's apartment building and ran in just as a foot patrol police officer also ran in to assist. Weiss carried with her her ALS bag and an cardiac monitor as the two of them ran up to her apartment on the second floor where the two of them lived alone. Inside, May was performing CPR, crying the whole time and telling her wife, "Please, make it! Damn it, I can't lose you, too!" She had lost her mother, a volunteer firefighter as well, in the August 23rd attacks, as she was one of 15 firefighters from the company killed.

Weiss said to her, "May, we're here! We're here! Continue CPR while I get the stuff ready!" She then directed the police officer, "Grab the BVM and the monitor while I get the airway in!" As the police officer did just that, she pulled out a laryngoscope and began to insert it into the patient's airway as she also pulled out a long plastic intubation tube. Once the tube was in, she pulled the laryngoscope out and pulled an oxygen tank out of her ALS bag. Once she turned it on and hooked it up to the intubation tube, she set it to the correct amount. "Is the AED on the monitor ready?"

"Yeah," the police officer replied as the monitor instructed all of them to not touch the patient, which all of them complied with as Ambulance 201 pulled up out front. "Okay, it's telling me to shock! Everyone clear!" He then pressed down on the SHOCK button, shocking May's wife and causing her chest to rise and then fall. "Here's the rhythm by the way!"

As Weiss read over the rhythm, she could hear the ambulance crew rush up the stairs. "Alright. That rhythm is better, but we still need to do more work!" As the crew walked in, Weiss instructed them, "I got her on a monitor already. I'll go get an OPQRST from Lieutenant Greenwald." Weiss then turned to May, "Hey, LT, come with me." The two then walked into the kitchen of the apartment together as a firefighter handed Weiss a Patient Questionnaire sheet with a pen. As they sat down at the table, Weiss started off with, "May, I'm really sorry about all this."

"Thank you," May replied as she stifled her tears and wiped her eyes. "She just said she was having some chest pain, so I was gonna take her to the hospital after some Aspirin didn't work, and then she just collapsed right in front of me."

"Alright," Weiss replied as she wrote down that information. "Was she doing anything when the chest pain occurred?"

"We were just talking as normal in the living room," May explained to her. "As for the next parts of OPQRST, well, she wasn't really doing anything that could really provoke any sort of angina. Before she collapsed, she told me that the pain was in her chest and lower back, but it wasn't going anywhere else. It felt like a stabbing pain, according to her. It took a few minutes of this chest pain for her to collapse, and she collapsed literally about four minutes before you got here."

"I see," Weiss added as she finished her writing. "Now, as for the SAMPLE history, I know she's only allergic to amoxicillin, and I highly doubt that that's the cause here. Has this chest pain happened before?"

"A few times," May explained to her. "But never this severe. It's why we have the Aspirin. We have it in Adult form, so it's the 325mg one. She took one of those. As for her last oral intake, she last ate something about an hour ago when she had an apple and a banana with some water."

"Not to make light of this," Weiss noted to her. "But I gotta say, this kind of stuff is a lot easier when you're talking to someone who already is EMS-certified."

"You know," May added, trying to bring some light into the otherwise grim situation. "You're right about that." She then had a brief chuckle that was soon replaced by a feeling of dread and emotional pain. "Oh my God... I don't want my wife to die."

"I know," Weiss comforted her with a pat on her shoulder. "We don't either. Shelley's been an active member of our auxiliary ever since you two first began dating. We're gonna do everything in our power, trust me. I mean, you already know that since you've been in this situation plenty of times, just never on this side of it."

"Yeah," May replied to her. "I prayed that I wouldn't have to be, but here I am. I didn't need this, especially after my mom was murdered." She and Weiss then shared a much-needed hug as tears stained her business undershirt from May. "Please..."

...

May 4, 2022

As firefighters from Vigilant wrapped up at a 1-alarm convenience store fire around 10:16 AM, Weiss talked with city fire investigators about the fire. "According to the shop owner," Weiss explained to two of them. "It started in the rear of the store. There were a few customers inside, but they were all in the front. Everyone got out and nobody got hurt. He says that he heard a loud popping noise, followed by the lights flickering, and then smoke began pouring from the rear of the store. He thinks that, because of all this, it's electrical in origin, but he isn't sure exactly what appliance in the rear of the building caused the fire."

"Alright then," the fire investigator, an older man in his late 50s, replied to her as he wrote the information down in his notepad. "Yeah, we're starting to come to the same conclusion, actually. All we gotta do, like you said, is find out which appliance it was. Say, wasn't that fire you guys had in your first-due two days ago also electrical?"

"Yeah," Weiss replied, noting the coincidence now that she thought about it. "It was traced to a faulty air conditioner one of the tenants had just bought and installed it just three days prior to the fire. In fact, now that you mention it, the store owner told me he bought the same model of air conditioner on the 1st and had it installed the day after. That's three days, just like the first fire." As he walked away, she though to herself, "What if it's this model of air conditioner? Defective appliances have caused a rash of fires before they were taken off the market and recalled in the past. Maybe there were other fires in the city that we didn't go to that were caused by the same thing."

The same fire investigator then walked back to her, and told her after talking with two other investigators of the five on scene, "This is getting awfully suspicious. I told the captain we're with of the model of air conditioner that the store owner bought, and guess what? He told me this is the fourth damn time a fire started soon after one of these things was installed in the city in the past five days."

"I smell a product recall happening soon," Weiss commented to him. "And it better come soon, because the last time we had a fire involving this in my area, a baby almost died. I don't want to take that risk again before someone actually does die."