Ambulance Girl

by Jane Stern

  The anxiety was possibly worse than the depression. At least the depression had me in bed each day at one in the afternoon for my three-hour nap, exhausted from a morning of watching TV and doing nothing. “Don’t you want to go to the barn with me and see the horses?” Michael asked.

  I knew my horse was going unridden, and probably felt abandoned. “Maybe tomorrow,” I said, and drifted off to the sweet sleep of temporary oblivion. Riding seemed an impossibility. Sometimes I would go to the closet in the bathroom where I kept the manicure utensils and nail polishes and look at them, I would pick out a polish and go back to sitting in my chair. I looked down and my feet seemed too far away to deal with, too much effort, too great a stretch.

  Michael and I were working on weekly segments for a show to which we contributed on National Public Radio. We would broadcast each week sounding like we had the greatest job in the world: chipper, the world’s most loving couple, the happiest people on earth. Our producer called and told us that radio listeners wanted to meet us, and we were to fly to Minneapolis, where the radio station had arranged a bus trip with our fans to a restaurant about three hours into the country.

  I wondered if I could do all this. First I had to pull myself together and pack for the trip. I had to look decent; I could not meet National Public Radio listeners in my blue bathrobe. Then Michael and I had to take a plane trip, something we had done often but that I always dreaded. Fear of flying was high on my list of discomforts. And then, once we landed, I had to do the most heinous thing of all: ride on a bus. It had been thirty-five years since I’d set foot on one. I was totally phobic about buses. I hated public transportation, refused to take it, and now three hours with a group of strangers on a bus going who-knows-where . . . well, it was not something I looked forward to.

  The producer of our show, Sally Swift, is a wonderful person—smart, funny, and sympathetic; so I got up the nerve to be candid with her. “I don’t do buses,” I said. I felt like a diva; in fact I was a depressed mess. After about twenty minutes of explanation, we agreed that Michael would ride the bus and I would follow behind the bus in Sally’s car.

  “I’ll try to get on the bus, maybe it will work,” I said to Michael. On the flight to Minneapolis I practiced thinking about a bus, and then getting on it. I visualized what a bus looked like. The only buses I rode were the ones from the airport to the car rental place and I hyper-ventilated the whole time. Being a passenger put me out of control, and all my anxiety stemmed from a fear of forfeiting or losing control. If I couldn’t drive the bus or have Michael drive it, it was unbearable. The more I knew that someone else controlled the opening or closing of the bus doors, the higher my anxiety level went. To me, the air in the airport bus was stale and sickening, and the level of noise from people making happy conversation became shrieking and painful to my ears.

  The night before the bus ride we went to Sally’s house for dinner. I wanted to cry. I wanted her life. She was thin and athletic and pregnant with her second baby. Her first child was gorgeous and sweet and the house she and her husband, Tom, lived in was perfect. Every object was aesthetically lovely, her garden bright and blooming with herbs and flowers, the food she served a bounty of homegrown vegetables and delicious homemade breads. It was also perfectly casual; Sally wore her trademark bright red sneakers and seemed to host the dinner party effortlessly. I wanted her life—but what the hell would I do with it? The flowers and fruits would all wilt and rot as I sat in my green chair and watched the Ricki Lake Show. I was nauseous from the good health and calm that radiated from this happy household.

  But the next morning I managed to pull myself together enough to resemble the bright chatty person people heard on the radio. These listeners were paying a hundred bucks apiece to meet Michael and me, so I felt it was the least I could do to wash my face. When Michael and I got to the bus in which we were going to spend the next six hours, I panicked. It looked like a car-rental bus and I didn’t like the driver’s looks. He looked like the type of person who would not stop the bus if I asked him to.

  “I can’t do this,” I whispered to Michael. I could see the look of frustration on his face. “I’m sorry,” I said, wishing I could give him money or a gift to make up for my shortcomings as a wife and partner.

  “I can’t do this,” I said to Sally, who was blessedly cool about it.

  “Yeah, you said you would rather ride in the car with me,” she said.

  I felt like a big baby. I thought about all the field trips in grade school that I missed because I was afraid to be on a bus, or away from home. My phobias and separation anxieties went way back to my childhood. “I’ll talk to the listeners when we get to the restaurant,” I said, trying to make it better. I felt like an asshole as I got in the front seat of her car.

  At the end of a long day, the bus trip was over. Michael had been charming enough for both of us; our listeners seemed happy. They liked the NPR tote bags that were given to them and they had liked the restaurant we had traveled so many miles to eat at.

  I was glad, but I was still complaining. “I don’t know why we couldn’t have just eaten somewhere in Minneapolis,” I said to Michael as we sat waiting for the plane. “There are plenty of great places to eat there.”

  Michael looked at me. I could tell he was tired and pissed off. “They live in Minneapolis. The point was to go on an adventure, go somewhere new,” he said.

  I got defensive. “I think it is stupid. There are many good places to eat in town that we wouldn’t have to take a bus to.” Michael chose not to answer. He took out his laptop computer and started to work, staring at the small screen so he could block me out.

  We were not going home. We were headed for Chicago, a fifty-five-minute flight from Minneapolis. We had been asked to give a lecture the next day at a Chicago-based think tank. They wanted to know what we had observed about other people’s eating habits: what they ate, what aisles they shopped in the supermarket, what food magazines appealed to what demographics. They were putting us up at the Four Seasons in a lavish suite and paying us well. It was exciting and I was looking forward to it.

  With the long bus ride behind me, I never imagined that the true nightmare was just about to begin. We boarded the plane and taxied away from the gate. Then a strange thing happened. We headed off the main runway onto a smaller one, then taxied all the way to the farthest outskirts of the airport. There the plane stopped and shut off its engines.

  My fear of flying had little to do with crashing, and everything to do with claustrophobia. To me a plane was a sealed metal tube—an MRI machine with wings. If it was moving in the direction it was supposed to be going, I was all right; but any delay caused my anxiety level to hit 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. It was dusk and I could see through the dirty little windows of the plane that we were not even near the airport anymore. The fact that the engines were turned off was a dire sign. I held my breath. I tried not to hyperventilate. I grabbed Michael’s hand; mine was cold as ice and sweaty at the same time. Michael gave me the look —the look that comes from thirty years of living with someone who has raging anxiety. It is a look that is both sympathetic and reassuring. It is one of the many reasons to love Michael.

  Finally the pilot clicked on the intercom. “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” he droned in that familiar flat, emotionless way (are they taught to talk that way at pilot school?) “seems like we are going to sit here for a little while. O’Hare seems to be having some traffic control problems. I will let you know when we are taking off.”

  We sat on the runway for six hours. During this time my body pumped so much adrenaline that I thought I was having a heart attack every five minutes. Michael said every soothing thing he could think of. After three hours into the delay I stretched out limply over his lap and let him stroke my head. “When are we going to move?” I whined at Michael as if he were a fortune-telling genie who held the secret answer. I got up and paced the aisles. I tried to breathe deeply, I tried not to breathe. I felt my temples thr
obbing and was convinced I was having a stroke.

  I reached into my purse and lapped up the powdered remains of a decade-old Valium that I had been carting around for just such an occasion. The container was so old that the doctor’s name had worn off. The flight attendants were not pleasant; obviously they were pissed off too. The pilot stopped giving us updates after the first two hours. The sun had set and I could see nothing out the plane’s windows, no lights, nothing.

  The air was stale, the lavatory toilet clogged after the second hour, there was no food on the plane since it was only supposed to be an hourlong flight.

  The Valium was useless. Michael did the best he could. He opened his wallet and showed me pictures of our pets. He tried to talk about what we would eat in Chicago when we landed. Nothing could get my attention from the fact that the plane was not moving. I died the thousand deaths of a coward before the plane finally took off.

  By the time we arrived at the hotel my nervous system was so overtaxed that I propped myself up on the reception desk like a drunk on a lamppost. Once in our room I dived under the bedcovers and fell into a dreamless sleep.

  Somehow I got through the presentation the next day, but on the return flight home our plane was again delayed two hours. I had run out of adrenaline. My body felt numb, and I felt disconnected and unreal. When I got home I called a psychiatrist that a friend had recommended. He was supposed to be good.

  Psychiatry was not new to me. It was the family business. My uncles were psychoanalysts, even though, despite being members of distinguished university faculties and respected Freudian institutes, they were too phobic to fly on planes. They were very old school about the treatment of phobias, which meant they believed in talking about “underlying issues.” My favorite uncle was at Yale Medical School and I remember how proud he was to have patients who had been with him for decades.

  My uncle would take an ocean liner to Europe when he had to go to a psychiatric convention abroad, and when his own father was on his deathbed in Los Angeles, he and my mother took a five-day train trip across the country rather then set foot on a plane. My grandfather died two days before they arrived.

  When Michael and I were students in graduate school, my uncle, who was having his office redecorated, gave us his well-worn leather analyst’s couch. I imagined that to press on it would let lose a stream of cries and wails. In bed at night sometimes I fantasized the living room filling with floating words, years of why his patients were miserable and stuck in their fears and fantasies. The words circled the ceiling, not going anywhere.

  As comfortable as I was about seeing a shrink, I was also skeptical. Blah, blah, blah, and big monthly bills was what I imagined. It seemed like a dead-end road to me.

  But nonetheless I appeared for my first session with the new psychiatrist and found that I liked him even before I saw him. I was comforted by the delicate orchid that he had growing in the waiting room, the collection of wooden walking sticks, and artwork that was many levels above the usual museum posters and such that shrinks use to decorate their waiting rooms. He greeted me and ushered me into his office. I had already told him on the phone about my six hours on the runway. With a sympathetic shake of his blond hair, he began the session by saying, “What a fucking nightmare.”

  Ahh, at last: a shrink I could relate to, who expressed my sentiments perfectly. Maybe he could pull me out of the muck of depression and make it seem safe to venture out in the world again. Convince me, I thought, as I looked around his office, that the world is not just waiting to trap me in buses, airplanes, and in my own black stupor in front of the TV set.

  I think that good psychotherapy is like love or friendship. So much of it is indefinable chemistry between two people. I had seen three shrinks before and had not felt any improvement. When I was a student at Yale my father died and my fear of buses and airplanes expanded to include elevators and subways. Taking a bus was something my therapist and I had talked about in depth. One day en route to a session, my car broke down in New Haven. I did a marathon run to his office, arriving only ten minutes late. “Why didn’t you take a bus?” he asked me blankly. I felt like I had been talking to a wall for a year.

  My new shrink’s name was Tom Knox. The fact that I could not afford his rates did nothing to sour me on wanting to see him. I knew I belonged on that couch facing him in his black leather chair. I liked everything about him, from the bottoms of his shoes that faced me as he put them up on the ottoman in front of his chair to the Bose radio in his waiting room.

  In our first sessions together he tried to have me recall if there was one moment, even a fraction of a second, in the endless adrenaline bath of panic I had taken on that plane, when I didn’t feel like the whole world was collapsing around me.

  Yes, there was. At one point about three hours into the ordeal, a high school kid who was on the first leg of a charter flight to Switzerland with his classmates took ill. He hadn’t eaten all day and was feeling dizzy.

  “There is nothing to eat on this plane,” the flight attendant told him curtly, and he looked pale and frightened.

  I had a candy bar in my handbag. I pulled it out and walked to the seat where he sat with a few classmates huddled around him trying to give him moral support. I asked him if he would like the candy bar, suggesting it might make him feel more energized. He looked uncomfortable but he took it. He ate it, and in about ten minutes his cheeks were pink and he was laughing with his friends.

  The crisis over, I began fretting again about myself, about being trapped in the plane, but that few minutes of being involved in helping someone else worked like the Valium should have, but didn’t.

  I began seeing Tom Knox once a week. I checked his credentials, all good: Johns Hopkins for medical school, New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center for internship and residency. He believed in talking, but he also believed in drugs. He put me on an antidepressant and I felt significantly better almost at once. He gave me a new fresh supply of Valium and told me to take it when I needed it, that carrying it around in my handbag for a decade was not going to help get me through my fears. I trusted him. I trusted his gray sweater vest and the good smell of the leather chairs inside his office. Maybe there was hope for me after all.

  3

  “I think I want to be an EMT,” I told Tom during a session. I was amazed that he did not laugh at me. He smiled and said it sounded interesting. At this point he knew me well enough to know that my family history was not only awash with nutcases, but also littered with the sick and dead, and that the mere mention of illness caused my heart to race and my temples to throb.

  By the time I was twenty-five, both my parents had died from cancer. My favorite uncle, the shrink at Yale, followed suit soon after, as did his twenty-nine-year-old daughter, who died from breast cancer. My aunt died of Alzheimer’s, my other cousin died at twenty-three in a car wreck. Even my dog died during that grim period. It had all left me with a bad case of hypochondria. Every twinge was a brain tumor, MS, or a stroke. Something awful was always about to happen to me.

  I had been seeing Tom Knox for about two months when I stopped, after a shrink session, at the Georgetown firehouse to talk to someone about becoming an EMT. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision and I was dressed to kill, not to cure. I wore a long, flowing, three-tiered silk skirt and a bright red Chinese silk jacket with a mandarin collar, blue custom-made cowboy boots with my initials on them in yellow, and long silver and turquoise earrings. Since the antidepressants had kicked in I was again getting dressed and using makeup. I thought I looked pretty good.

  The man in charge of accepting EMT applications was in his seventies, hard-nosed and gruff. His name was Charlie. He looked at me and said, “Lady, I don’t think this is for you,” then went into a long soliloquy about vomit.

  Vomit was his personal nemesis, the world’s worst and most abhorrent thing. He looked at my silk outfit. “They’ll vomit all over you,” he said, trying to scare me. He did. I hated vomit too. In fact, vom
it was high on my scale of things that made me panic. I was so afraid of vomiting myself that it never occurred to me that I might be the target of someone else’s spew.

  Then came a not very subtle remark about my age (old) and my weight (heavy). The bottom line, as he saw it, was that I was too old, too fat, and too fancy for the job.

  His dismissal of me had a strange effect. I went home and cried and pouted and fumed, and raged about the unfairness of everyone and everything. I called Tom Knox and cried to him, and then I got pissed off and decided that nothing in the world could stop me from becoming an EMT.

  Nothing except perhaps my own formidable demons.

  Top of the demon list was my lifelong claustrophobia. I woke up in a cold sweat at 2 A.M. trying to recall what an ambulance looked like. I remembered that they seemed to have two parts, the driver’s compartment and the “room” part where the sick person was put. Were there windows in the back? Did the doors open from the inside? Was there a way to get from the back part to the driver’s part if you had to? Or were you trapped in the back end with the sick, possibly vomiting person, locked in and unable to escape?

  I paced the bedroom, and at 8 A.M. I called the firehouse and again spoke to Charlie. “Can I come and look at the ambulance?” I asked.

  There was a long pause. I don’t think he wanted to see me again but he said I could look at it if I wanted.

  Later that day I went back to the firehouse. I didn’t dare tell him about my claustrophobia or fear of moving vehicles, certainly wouldn’t tell him I was afraid of sick people. This time I wore jeans and a T-shirt. I opened the doors of the back of “the bus,” as it was referred to, and crawled in. I didn’t like what I saw one bit. It was like a shrunken emergency room, oxygen masks and suction tubes and bandages and splints and other vile icons of death and dying were crammed into a small space.

  A small passage space allowed contact with the front compartment and the doors could be opened from the inside, and the little windows opened to let in fresh air. It was not a totally sealed space, but it still gave me the creeps.