“Shouldn’t you be flying the fuckin’ plane then?” Matt asked plainly.
“My copilot has got it under control at the moment,” Bordon said stiffly. “Right now, I’m a little more concerned that one of my passengers is having a medical emergency involving his heart.”
“It’s cool, dude,” Matt assured him. “It’s happened to me before. My man Jim here fixed me up. Everything’s back to normal now.”
Bordon looked at the monitor beeping away, the IV bag that Corban was still holding aloft going into Matt’s arm, the opened packages and debris lying on the floor of the aisle. “It doesn’t look like everything is cool to me,” he said. “It looks like a serious medical issue is occurring on my aircraft and that makes me responsible. I think it would be in everyone’s best interest if I were to make an emergency landing as soon as possible and have an ambulance waiting for you on the ground.”
“How fast could you make that happen?” asked Austin.
“Austin!” Matt barked. “What the fuck, dude?”
“I think the man’s right, boss,” Austin told him. “We’re way up in the fuckin’ sky here. And Jim’s the shit, I’ll be the first to agree, but this is your heart, man!”
“We’re flying over southeastern Texas right now,” Bordon said. “I can have us on the ground at Houston Intercontinental in twenty-five minutes.”
“Texas!” Matt nearly screamed. “No fuckin’ way! Bad shit always happens to me in Texas!”
“I’m sorry,” Bordon said. “I’m afraid I don’t have a choice here.”
“You don’t understand, dude!” Matt told him. “Texas is a fucked-up place! I had a bunch of good old boys kick the shit out of me at a truck stop in Texas and then me and Jake Kingsley got sent to jail for it. And, once in that jail, a couple of cops beat my head in with a telephone book just because I asked one of them if his daughter took it up the ass!”
“That’s all very unfortunate,” Bordon said, “and perhaps even understandable if you indeed asked the man that, but the fact of the matter is...”
“That ain’t all though!” Matt interrupted. “My bud Darren—God rest his soul and may Kingsley rot in hell—fuckin’ blew himself up on stage in Texas! And he fucked up the end of our show there too! And, as if that shit ain’t enough, the first time my heart ever did this SVT shit and some medic had to light me up like fuckin’ Hiroshima 1945, was in Texas! In Houston, Texas as a matter of fact! You can’t take me down there!”
“Those are all incidents that sound regrettable and traumatic,” Bordon allowed, “but nevertheless, I don’t really have a choice. When I am told that one of my passengers has a heart condition and it was required in-flight that he receive intravenous cardiac medications because of a life-threatening arrythmia, my hands are kind of tied. We’ll be landing in Houston in about twenty-five minutes. An ambulance will be there waiting for you at the terminal. It is your choice whether or not to get in that ambulance, but you will not be going any further on this aircraft than that.”
With that, Bordon turned around and walked back to the cockpit. He closed the door behind him.
“Man, what a rip,” Matt said, shaking his head.
“I think it’s for the best, Matt,” Jim told him. “Truth be told, I wasn’t that thrilled about finishing out the flight after what just happened.”
“I would’ve been fine,” Matt grumbled. “I always have been before, right?”
The captain used the overhead intercom to announce that the plane was making an emergency landing at Houston Intercontinental due to a medical emergency aboard, that descent would start immediately, and ordered everyone to buckle back into their respective seats. Diane, the flight attendant, tried to get Jim to stow the monitor back in the overhead compartment but he refused.
“No way,” he told her. “I’ll string it back here and buckle it into the seat next to me, but it’s going to stay attached to Matt so I can monitor him.”
She agreed to this plan as long as she got to inspect how it was buckled and the rest of the football was closed up and stowed back in the overhead. They had hardly even begun this task when the sound of the engines decreased and the nose of the aircraft dipped downward, reducing everyone’s weight by an eighth of a G or so.
Matt’s heart rhythm continued to bound along at a rate that, while not quite sedate, was at least not dangerous. Matt himself continued to insist that he felt fine and that all of this shit was unnecessary.
“But you’ll go to the hospital, right?” Jim asked him several times.
“Yeah,” Matt grumbled. “I’ll fuckin’ go, if only to get you to stop nagging me about it like a bitch.”
“Deal,” Jim agreed.
The plane landed normally and taxied to one of the gates in Terminal C. As promised, there was an airport fire crew and an ambulance crew from the City of Houston Fire Department waiting for them. The EMS crew and two of the firefighters boarded the plane and, at Diane’s direction, stopped at Matt’s seat. Jim, by now, had unbuckled and was standing up, the LifePak back on the floor. The paramedic—a young male in his late-twenties with short, neatly cropped hair—looked first at the monitor and the IV bag (raising his eyebrows a bit at the sight of them) and then took a good look at his patient. It was plain to see that he recognized him.
“Matt Tisdale?” he asked, surprised. “No way!”
“Way,” Jim told him. “We were on our way back to LA from Jacksonville and had to make an emergency landing here. I’m Jim Ramos, Matt’s tour paramedic.”
“Tour paramedic for Matt Tisdale?” the Houston medic asked. “That’s tight! How’d you get a job like that?”
“I just kind of stumbled into it, really,” Jim told him. “Anyway, Matt is a thirty-six-year-old male with a history of PSVT episodes, sometimes requiring cardioversion, sometimes treatable with Adenosine. He is also a habitual cocaine user, heavy marijuana smoker, heavy cigarette smoker, and a card-carrying alcoholic.”
“Damn, dude,” Matt said. “That’s harsh. Ain’t you got anything nice to say about me?”
“I’m giving report to the medic who is going to be taking care of you,” Jim told him. “I have to give him your history.”
“I’m down with that,” Matt said, “but can’t you throw in some of my good attributes as well?”
“Uh ... sure,” Jim said. He turned back to the Houston medic. “He’s also a badass guitar player, a great singer, a boss who pays me quite well for the job I do, and he scores more and better pussy than a firefighter like yourself could probably even imagine.”
“That’s saying a lot,” the medic said respectfully.
“Isn’t it?” Jim asked. “Anyway, this is what happened today:” And, with that, he explained about Matt’s latest episode of SVT and what he, Jim had done about it.
“You have Adenosine, huh?” the Houston medic asked. “That’s cool shit. We’ve been trying to get the EMS authority to give us that for years.”
Jim did not mention that the legality of him carrying and using the Adenosine was questionable at best. “Yeah, the doc who oversees me is onboard with all the latest. Anyway, the captain insisted that we land here and get Matt to the hospital. Matt is reluctant, but he agreed to go.”
“Sounds good,” the medic said. He then went over the entire story with Matt one more time, just to make sure they were all on the same page. While he assessed the guitarist, his partner and the fire crew took a set of vital signs on Matt and then replaced Jim’s Lifepak with one of their own. Jim handed the medic several printouts he had recorded when Matt had been in the SVT.
“Do you want us to stay with you, Matt?” asked Austin as the medic got ready to walk Matt off the aircraft.
“Fuck no,” Matt said. “You all just stay on the plane and get home to those you want to rail. I’ll be all right. I’ll let them do their thing at the hospital and then I’ll be on another plane later tonight.”