The Emergency Medical Technicians who responded to Husband Five’s 911 call would not enter the house without hazmat suits.

I learned this from an article in her local newspaper, published the week after she died, called “Local Woman Dies in Squalor.”

I didn’t know this article existed until about two months after her death, when, following an intuition, I Googled her full married name + the town where she lived. I’d hoped to find nothing—a woman dying in a dirty home is such a mundane event, certainly not newsworthy—but instead I found hazmat suits.

The author of the article described the inside of my mother’s home as “fetid,” and noted the presence of “flying maggots.” For weeks, I obsessed over the phrase “flying maggots.” Hundreds and hundreds of weeks.

Also, the phrase “hazmat suits.”

Do EMTs do this a lot? Do they show up at a life-or-death emergency and say, Nope, no way, not going in there without a full body shield? I never considered it before the I read the article, but it makes sense. They risk their health every day for the job; they deserve full protection.

But at what point do they decide to suit up? Beyond clean gloves, and maybe a face mask? EMTs are constantly going into biohazardous environments, handling people covered in shit and vomit, arterial blood sprinkler-ing everywhere. So if these EMTs required hazmat suits, that means the house was extraordinarily bad, right?

Do they even carry hazmat suits in ambulances? I mean, were these standard Tyvek zip-ups with N95 masks, or did the EMTs demand full respirators and splash boots? Or did the EMTs simply don their everyday protective equipment, and the writer of the article was trying to make it sound more dramatic?

The writer did lay it on pretty thick. They made it sound like there was a showdown on the welcome mat, that precious minutes were lost while the EMTs crossed their arms and shook their heads. Like the hazmat suits had to come from the next town over via full police escort, sirens shrieking as they sped towards my mother’s house.

But this is all I know: the EMTs wouldn’t enter my mom’s house without hazmat suits. This is the succinct version of this whole pile of pages, in one sentence. The most telling detail, and the detail I tell the most. I, too, can lay it on thick.