A call comes in for an “injury.” I frown at the computer screen mounted between our seats. “A little more information would be appreciated,” I tell it.

Down a few lines, I see it mentions a husband and wife in some sort of family dispute. I radio dispatch to confirm that the police department is also responding. I don’t want to get cracked over the head with a beer bottle.

Bronson complains about the street where the job is. “I always have strange jobs there,” he says. “Obese EDPs, old ladies with clown makeup, you name it.”

“Clown makeup?” I ask as we get out of the ambulance and greet the police officers.

“Like Baby Jane on acid.”

The two officers are shining flashlights into a first-floor apartment window, trying to see inside. “We can’t get in,” one says. “But I can see the woman from here. She’s bleeding from the head.”

“She on the floor?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “In a wheelchair. About 60 years old. But it’s hard to tell, she’s wearing all this makeup.” He laughs.

“Very funny,” I say. Bronson and I stand on tiptoes and peek in the window. The woman is morbidly obese, about 500 pounds, and sitting in a special doublewide wheelchair.

The police department’s Emergency Services Unit shows up and picks the building’s lock.

“I thought this was a husband-wife dispute,” I tell Bronson as we enter the apartment after the cops.

“When you assume —” he says, quoting one of my favorite “Odd Couple” episodes, in which Felix breaks down the word into its three components, one of which is very rude. ” Why can’t a 500-pound wheelchair-bound woman be married?”

“She can,” I say. “Except usually they’re not.”

Emergency workers assume a lot on this job, and are wrong only about 5% of the time — the exceptions to the rules. Emergency work has taught me that, mostly, the world is pretty cut-and-dried. And that clichés, while simplistic, also usually tend to get things right.

Inside the apartment, we find the woman in the wheelchair in a doorway leading to the kitchen and her husband passed out on the couch. She tells me her husband is “piss drunk.”

“We had an argument,” she says. “I tried to hit him with my cane but caught myself in the back of the head.”

I slap a bandage and gauze onto her scalp over a 2-inch laceration with lots of coagulated blood matting her hair. I can feel a large hematoma. “Nice size swelling you’ve got there,” I say.

“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” she answers.

Bronson rouses the drunk husband. “I want nothin’ to do with that whore,” he splutters.

I write the woman’s name and information onto my chart and ask her what medications she takes. She tells me Coumadin — a blood thinner.

“Great,” I say. “Even though the blood outside your head has coagulated, you may be bleeding inside. You have to go to the hospital.”

She looks down sadly and concedes. I ask her if she takes any other meds, and she tells me to go into her bedroom, they’re on her nightstand.

I look in her bedroom. On the walls are pictures of her and her husband — much younger, in happier times — in loving embraces. She was thin. There are old, frayed books on the shelf — “The Joy of Sex” and others — that a couple might share.

I hear the husband and wife start arguing again — bitter, nasty. Times have sadly changed, perhaps due in part to the woman’s obviously deteriorating health. Now she’s in a wheelchair and sleeps in a hospital bed, the bedroom filled with syringes for her diabetes, adult diapers for her incontinence, and the smell of urine.

As I’m considering her life, I come back into the living room to find her crying. Her husband doesn’t look at her. He stands in the kitchen unsteadily, on drunken legs, just looking out the window.

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