My partner Bronson and I get called for a “water condition” at an apartment in a housing project in East New York.

When we get there, the FDNY is already on-scene, shutting off the water main and checking all the apartments the water has gone through for damage. One of the residents, a sick woman in a bedroom, made the firemen worried enough to call us.

I wonder what we’ll find as I ride up the cramped rickety elevator to the fourth floor. Since the firemen put the call in to us themselves, this woman must be pretty out of it.

The apartment stinks of urine and feces. Bronson flips the light switch, but no lights come on. He flips the switch a few times to make sure. I turn on my flashlight and inspect the light fixtures.

“There are no light bulbs,” I say.

We make our way to the back bedroom and find a woman lying in her bed.

“Ma’am?” I ask. “What’s wrong?”

But she speaks only Creole. Plus she has the vacant stare of a person with Alzheimer’s. We can’t be sure, though. Communication with her is nearly impossible.

I open up the curtains and light floods the room. Immediately, roaches skitter off the woman’s bed and under the covers, into the safety of her nightgown. She doesn’t even swat them away.

Upon physical examination, I find her arms function fine, but her legs seem to be paralyzed. She doesn’t flinch when I scrape the soles of her feet with the cap of my ballpoint pen, and she doesn’t wiggle her toes when I pantomime the motion.

Stuck to Bronson’s damp boot is a piece of paper that looks like a note. I pick it up and read it aloud. “Ma. Call me.”

The note isn’t signed, but when I go back into the living room I find a dozen more scattered on the floor by the door. It’s clear the woman hasn’t been out of the house in weeks; the food in the fridge is spoiled and moldy and the garbage is overflowing. Half-eaten TV dinners lie on every available surface, the older ones dried up, the newer ones rotting and crawling with still more roaches that don’t even bother to run from the light. Apparently, she hasn’t answered her doorbell in weeks, and her son or daughter never thought to call 911.

I inspect the rest of the apartment. The entire bathroom ceiling is collapsed. The firemen are in there making their report.

I come back to find Bronson is taking the woman’s vital signs. She’s stable, but emaciated, and extremely dehydrated. I pull the skin on the back of her hand, and it tents when I let go. She probably hasn’t had any water in days.

I don’t see any signs of medications, no bottles or prescriptions lying around, but it’s easy to miss such a thing with all the trash, and I can’t communicate well enough to ask her.

It’s clear she’s been bedridden for a while.

This woman needs to be taken care of, if not by her family then by the state. I’m appalled at the son or daughter who cares enough to come around but doesn’t seem to have the common sense enough to know when something’s wrong. A few more days, and she would have died from dehydration. I fill out a neglect report so that she will be put into a nursing home.

While I do this, Bronson is talking to her in gentle tones. She doesn’t understand any English, and answers only vacuously in Creole, but she does seem to be responding to his kind voice. She smiles a little, and lets him lift her frail body out of the foul, soiled bed and into the stair-chair. She lets him put an oxygen mask on her face.

“Ma’am, we’re going to take you to Kings County Hospital to get checked out,” he says. Then he goes on about the nice weather today, spring is coming, the snow is almost all melted. Anything to keep the mellow tones of his voice in her ears, anything to make her feel that she is not totally forgotten. “We’ll go to a nice hospital where they’ll feed you and take care of you,” he says. “Then, after that, a place where they’ll bathe you every day and take care of you some more.”

In the elevator, Bronson stops his soft monologue briefly to lean into my ear. “If ever I end up like this, shoot me,” he whispers.

Ms. Klopsis is an emergency medical technician for the FDNY. This column details her observations and experiences on the job. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of patients.