Ambulance Girl

by Jane Stern

  Fortunately, the ambulance has beaten me to the call and as I pull in and park on the side of the road, I survey the scene. The local cops are diverting traffic around a slightly dinged car and an extremely creased motorcycle. The motorcycle driver and a woman passenger are sitting up on the pavement. They are not wearing helmets, and as I walk closer I can tell they are both shit-faced drunk. The cops are talking to the driver of the car, who is irate at the motorcycle driver. “He just peeled out in front of me, I couldn’t stop.”

  The bike is a massive new Harley, now reduced to junk. The windshield has left little shards of glass all over the road, the bike has dumped the passengers and then hit the guardrail. It is twisted and useless. I walk closer to the driver of the bike. He is trying to stand; the firemen are holding him down so Bernice can put a cervical collar on him in case he has broken his neck and is too drunk to notice. He is moaning, not from pain or for his girlfriend, but for the Harley. He wails in a high-pitched yelp like an angry coyote. I hope he starts to rend his garments, as it will save me from having to cut them off. I can smell him and his girlfriend from ten feet away.

  Bernice is joined by Mike Cappello, a senior EMT, a silver-haired, slim, unflappable guy.

  “They’re drunk,” I offer my professional assessment.

  “I know,” Mike says. “Jane, go to the rig and get the frac pack.”

  I run toward the ambulance. I come to a halt. I have no idea what a frac pack is and I don’t know where it is. I trot back to Mike.

  “Where is the frac pack stored?” I ask. I don’t have the nerve to ask him what it is. If he tells me the location then maybe I can fake it.

  I rummage around in the compartment he has directed me to. I see all sorts of things. “Frac pack,” I mutter, hoping it will answer me. “Right here!” it will say.

  My mind starts to cogitate. “Frac . . . fracture,” I think. This is like a game. Fracture pack! Okay, Mike wants the duffel bag filled with all the splints and cravats to package the drunk biker’s broken limbs. I pull out the duffel bag and run back to Mike.

  “Here.” I hand it to him as proudly as a hunting dog with a downed bird in my mouth.

  He throws it back at me. I am not his gofer, I am an EMT. He wants me to splint the guy. I rummage around in the bag and come up with two leg splints. The biker’s right leg is twisted badly, obviously broken. “Cut off his shoe,” Mike directs me. I take out my blunt scissors, but they’re no match for a motorcycle boot. I saw at it, cut the laces and straps, and finally it comes off. I brush away shards of shattered glass, I pick gravel off his pants. I take a pulse in his foot to see if he has circulation. I notice out of my peripheral vision that Bernice and the cops are working on the woman passenger. She is now sitting up, smiling, happy as if she just won the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.

  The paramedic appears. He jumps in to survey the scene. He looks at the smashed bike and then at the bikers. They are in amazingly good shape, considering. I think of the old adage that God protects fools and drunks.

  We are going to transport both of them to the hospital. The guy, who is the more bruised and bloodied, goes on the cot, and the woman on a long spine board that is placed on the cushioned seat on the side of the ambulance. Two passengers, a paramedic who will ride with them, Bernice and . . . who? . . . me?

  “You go,” Mike says to me. I think he knows I am about to come up with another excuse why I can’t get in the ambulance.

  The two motorcyclists, Bernice, and the paramedic are in and waiting for me. I make a tentative step toward the rig.

  “Let’s go,” a voice from the driver’s seat yells. I pick up the pace. I grab a side rail and hoist myself into the vehicle. I feel like I am pulling a great weight against gravity. Someone slams the big metal door behind me and I feel the rig jump-start, lights and sirens flashing. We are moving.

  I am ambivalent, to say the least. I am proud that I am inside, but I don’t want to be there. It’s like being trapped in a crowded elevator with a bunch of strangers. In this case two of the strangers are bloody and drunk.

  It is night and the neon overhead lights cast a greenish stark glow on the inside of the rig. Suddenly I know I’d better find a place to position myself because I am about to fall over. The ambulance is going at a moderate clip, but from the backseat it feels like a roller coaster. We are hitting potholes and curves I never knew existed on this road before.

  I am not part of the team. I am an outsider looking at what is happening. I stand mutely hanging on to a metal bar on the ceiling, trying not to fall. It is like getting your sea legs on a ship in the middle of a storm.

  “Cut his jacket off,” the medic says to me.

  “Okay,” I reply. “By the way, my name is Jane,” I say politely. Silence. He doesn’t care what my name is, he has a job to do.

  I pick up a pair of scissors and start to hack away at the thick black leather jacket that the man is wearing. We can’t take it off him in the regular manner because he must stay immobilized on the spine board.

  He is drunk, but not so drunk that he doesn’t know I am about to ruin his beloved biker jacket. “Get away from me, you bitch,” he yells. “Don’t touch my leathers.”

  “Get the jacket off,” says the paramedic. I start to cut again. The man screams at me to leave him alone. I decide I’d better listen to the paramedic, who needs a bare arm and access to a vein to start an IV line.

  “My leathers, my leathers,” the biker moans as I reveal his arm bit by bit.

  “Don’t do that,” I hear a voice from the padded side bench wail. It is his woman friend, whom Bernice is examining for trauma wounds. I assume the girlfriend is hurt and Bernice has touched something painful. But I am wrong. “Don’t cut his leathers,” she moans at me.

  I pay no attention to her, I do what I can do, which is to cut with a blunt scissors. It is slow going. I have a sharp knife in my pocket that I know would slice the jacket off in a second, but I can hardly hold myself up from falling in the back of the rig, and all I need at this point is a big unsheathed blade to do damage with. I imagine myself falling on the patient and stabbing him to death.

  Despite the commotion, I get the arm exposed. The medic taps a vein and plunges a needle into it. He hooks a bag of saline to a hook on the ceiling and starts an IV drip. In this chaotic madhouse I realize a few things. Within a few minutes the two people are neatly hooked up to IVs, they are both wearing oxygen masks, they have been gone over thoroughly, and their bruises and bloody parts have been assessed and attended to. There is a sudden calm in the rig. They are two very lucky people, neither one seriously hurt, just surface cuts and the guy’s splinted leg.

  “Jane, start filling out the pad,” Bernice says as she passes me the small white pad that contains all the very basic information we will need on a patient: name, address, date of birth, allergies, medications, blood pressure, and pulse.

  I ask the biker his name. The booze he has drunk has made him mumble, and the oxygen mask further muffles his speech. His woman friend is receiving oxygen through a nasal cannula, so she can talk more clearly.

  “What’s his name?” I ask her.

  “Bozo,” she giggles.

  I start to write on the pad and stop, realizing this is not a name. “What’s his real name?” I say.

  She finds the whole situation a riot. She is convulsed with laughter. When she stops laughing, I try again. “His name, please,” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs.

  “Is he your boyfriend?” I ask her. I think maybe she is his daughter, he is at least twenty years older than she is.

  “Yeah, we’ve been dating for five months. But I don’t know his name. I just call him Bozo.”

  I am dumbfounded. “Look in his wallet,” says Bernice. I pull the wallet from what remains of his jacket. He has a name. He also has a gold American Express card, and a business card that identifies him as the president of a small local business. He is a weekend motorcycle warrior, and
his girlfriend must come with the “Saturday night at the bar” outlaw package.

  Finally I am doing something I can do. I am writing words on a pad of paper. I have done this before. I neatly print his name, his address, and take the vitals that Bernice has just taken and write them on the pad.

  “Are you allergic to anything?” I ask.

  “Mmpph,” he says through the oxygen mask.

  “Do you take any medication?”

  “Ggrrtt,” he slurs.

  I think to ask his girlfriend, but the odds are that if she doesn’t know his name she won’t know his medical history. I leave the spaces blank.

  “Change seats with me,” the medic says. We do a precarious ballet in the back of the swaying rig. We climb around the patient so the medic can sit next to the two-way radio with which we call the hospital. We are five minutes away from the ER and he is going to make the call to tell them who we are bringing in and the extent of the injuries.

  I sit in the new seat and take a deep breath. All is calm. The patients are stable and packaged, ready to be rolled out for the ER staff. I have made it. My maiden voyage in the back of the ambulance. I was so busy with things to do, I didn’t have time to worry about my sanity.

  I listen to the medic call in. He gives our location, tells the ER the patients’ vital signs and the level of trauma so they can prepare as needed. The biker looks sleepy and calm. I pat his leg that I have bandaged, adjusting the tape a little so it looks textbook perfect.

  Something is wrong. I am sitting in a puddle of liquid. The first thing that I think is that I have peed in my pants from nervousness and am now just starting to notice. But the pee is cold and increasing quickly, and I know I am not actively peeing.

  With the medic on the radio and Bernice busy with the girlfriend, I sneak a look. I rise up a few inches and look at where I am sitting. I see the problem. When I changed seats with the medic I pulled the IV line out of the man’s arm and I am now sitting in a puddle of saline. The needle is still stuck in the man’s arm, but it is delivering nothing. The liquid is flooding around my ass.

  I grab the tubing. “Hey, this just happened,” I lie. “It must have pulled out when we went over that bump.” The medic quickly adjusts the tube, reattaching it to the needle. He doesn’t scream at me, for which I am eternally grateful. I wonder what people will think when I stand up and they see that the seat of my pants is soaking wet.

  “Okay,” Bernice says as we reach the hospital. “We’re here.”

  The ambulance driver backs in, and the rig makes beeping noises like a truck does. It comes to a stop. There is a flurry of action. The big doors are opened from the outside. The biker who is on the stretcher is taken out first, a second stretcher is brought around, and the girlfriend is transferred onto it. The cots are head to head. She reaches out and touches him.

  “I love you,” she purrs. “I can’t believe they cut your leathers.”

  “Mmmmmph,” he says back.

  We wheel them in, find the cubicles assigned to them, and hand them over to the nurse. We give her the basic information, and then take the long and intricate run form to the little desk that the EMTs share to fill it out. I watch Bernice fill it out at lightning speed. As she is doing that, the driver is disinfecting the rig and making up the cot with clean sheets.

  “Is there a ladies’ room?” I ask Bernice. She points me around the corner. I semistagger over to it. I just need to be alone by myself to process what just happened. I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I am an amazing mess. Without even taking my wet ass into consideration (the over-the-sink mirror doesn’t reach that low), my face is bright red and I am sweaty and disheveled. I pull off my surgical gloves and sweat runs down from the inside. Splashing water on my face helps a little; at least I am now wet all over.

  By the time I emerge from the ladies’ room, Bernice has filled out all the forms and has even made her trademark courtesy call to the patients before we leave. It is a nice touch; she always goes into their cubicles and says good-bye, to make sure they are okay.

  I flop along beside her, shaking and wet.

  We head back to the waiting ambulance, parked outside the ER. I climb into the back with Bernice. The paramedic’s car has been driven to the hospital by one of the firemen. In the back of the rig the lights are now lowered; it resembles a medical cocktail lounge, dim and antiseptic. Without the distraction of a patient my mind starts to think of claustrophobia and other reasons why I shouldn’t be here.

  “Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s, ladies?” comes the voice from behind the steering wheel.

  “Doughnuts,” Bernice and I call out in unison.

  How scary can this be if we get to eat doughnuts afterward? I think of what I am going to eat. My ass is drying. I like the neatly folded blanket on the cot, and the smell of the disinfectant.

  “Good job,” Bernice says to me.

  I feel flushed with happiness.

  “I did it,” I tell Tom Knox during my shrink session. He smiles broadly as I tell him how I was able to sit in the back of the ambulance and not freak out. “I knew you could do it,” he says. I inhale the comforting aroma of his office, I try to fix it in my mind to pull out like a snapshot for when things get rough.

  9

  I have been so focused on the ambulance that I have forgotten that I am now a member of a fire department and I have about thirty-five new people in my life that I have to get to know.

  Life at the Georgetown firehouse runs by a schedule. Every Monday night there is a meeting. The first Monday of the month is a business meeting where the secretary reads the minutes of the last meeting and new business is attended to. On the other Mondays we have drills, which can range from staging a mock mass casualty to being really lazy and going out in the ambulance for ice cream.

  Between Monday nights there are work details. They are called whenever something needs doing, which can range from scrubbing the ambulance to sweeping out the fire engine bays to hauling the Christmas lights down from the attic.

  I have showed up on a Saturday afternoon to help sweep out the fire bays. The engines are all pulled out, and I sensibly wear jeans and a work shirt and heavy boots. I am looking forward to hanging out with the firemen. I love firemen.

  When Michael and I used to live in another Connecticut town many years ago, a batty old lady lived in the apartment above us and always fell asleep while cooking something on her stove. On a regular basis she would set off fire alarms in her house and the town fire department would race to our building to snuff out a blazing chicken breast or a scorched steak. I liked the old lady’s fires because I was mad for the firemen. They were out of Playgirl magazine, big handsome hunks of men, wearing skintight T-shirts and yellow fire pants held up with red suspenders. They knew they looked hot and they were big flirts, casting a wink at me, flexing an arm muscle lazily as they put on their gear. I dreamed of their bunk-house, of how spectacular it would be to sit with them at a long table and share a meal.

  Now I had dozens of firemen of my own. I had seen them around town, racing to fires or washing the fire trucks in back of the firehouse, but never met them. I had admired their fire gear, the hats and jackets with their names on the back hanging on hooks, their boots and pants lined up and ready to leap into at the first call of trouble. The fire bay smelled like smoke and rubber; the huge fire trucks gleamed, the chrome polished like something in a jeweler’s case.

  When I arrived on Saturday morning for the work detail, a dozen firemen were already scrubbing and sweeping the bays. I was the only woman who showed up. When I appeared everyone grew silent. Only minutes before I could hear the banter, the curse words, the happy chatter; and now with me there, they acted like a nun had walked in on their fun. They swept the floors grim-faced and with eyes cast downward.

  I tried to make conversation, but could think of nothing to say. We all swept in silence for an hour and then I could see a huddle forming. Someone was going out to the deli to get egg and bacon
sandwiches and coffee. A fireman named Chris was taking orders and money. I kept sweeping. I didn’t know what to do, I was too shy to ask them to pick something up for me. They were too shy to ask me. In the deathly quiet of the bay I heard someone mumble, “Do you think she wants something?”

  “I dunno,” said another.

  They stood and looked at me sweep but no one said anything. The egg sandwich guy got in his pickup truck and drove the half mile to the deli. My stomach was rumbling by the time he came back. The guys stopped work and all got their sandwiches and steaming cups of coffee.

  In silence they unwrapped their fried eggs and bacon sandwiches and started to eat. They sipped coffee. I swept. I was now standing in the middle of a semicircle of eaters. I felt my cheeks flush. I wanted to put the broom down and run away. I could feel a blister start to form on my thumb where the heavy push broom had made a groove.

  I could see an extra egg sandwich and a cup of coffee in the cardboard box.

  Finally one of the firemen walked up to me. The other guys looked at their feet. “There’s a sannich for you and some coffee,” he said.

  I beamed. “Thanks, what do I owe you?”

  Caught off guard, he didn’t answer, instead picked up a broom and started sweeping next to me.

  I looked at the guys. No one would make eye contact. I walked over and peeled the wrappings back from the sandwich. I took a swig of coffee. I never take sugar in my coffee, and this was prepared the way all the guys drink it: “regular” . . . with milk and sugar.

  “Thanks,” I said with a mouth full of food. No one looked up. Nothing ever tasted so good to me.