Ambulance Girl

by Jane Stern

  I am torn between wanting to run away and trying to throw the rope again. I am moonstruck by the cold, the icy air, the good-looking men in their fire outfits, the big red truck glowing under the stars. I pick up the bag and coil the rope inside it, which seems to take forever. I imagine this is real life and some kid is drowning, and I am taking fifteen minutes to rewind the rope. I finally get it back in the bag. “I’m going to throw it again,” I announce. “Stand clear,” an officer says, and the firemen back away from me and cover their heads. I throw the rope and it goes in a straight line. It does not bean anyone. But it lands approximately five feet in front of me, a good forty-five feet from the drowning victim. “Help me,” the wet-suited fireman screams in faux panic as I madly coil the rope back in the bag.

  Snot is running out of my nose and my knees have gone numb from the cold. I ask Greg Zap, one of the training officers, if he has a Kleenex.

  “No,” he says and rips a dried leaf off a small maple tree and hands it to me. “You can use it for toilet paper, too,” he says. “That’s what they do in the Boy Scouts.”

  I wonder if he thinks I have shit in my pants. I blow my nose in the leaf, which mostly spreads the snot around my face, and resist the urge to wipe my nose on the canvas rescue bag. “I’m throwing it again.” People duck for cover. I wind up hard. I visualize, I see the rope floating right to the victim, I take a deep breath of freezing night air, and let go. The rope feeds out straight and true. It skitters to within about three feet of the man in the water. “Good job,” someone says. I walk sideways up the hill like Bernice showed me how to do. I have two new primitive skills under my belt: walking and throwing. It is a great evening.

  When the drill wraps up we all go back to the firehouse. One of the firemen shows us how to wash and line-dry all the rescue ropes. Each rope also has to be inspected inch by inch before it is put back in the bag.

  I would be a terrible fireman: I do not have the patience to do this; I would smoosh the damp rope back in the bag and assume it would be fine. “I’m not rolling any rope,” Bernice says. “No one helps us clean the ambulance.” The simmering anger between fire and EMS is back on the front burner again.

  When I first joined the fire department I was in awe of and uncomfortable around the firemen. One of the first times I was at the firehouse was after a large fire where a big two-story house burned to the ground. The guys had been fighting the fire for many hours before it was extinguished. The ambulance had come back to the firehouse before the fire trucks and I had gone upstairs to the ladies’ room to wash my face and brush my hair. Before putting my hairbrush back in the locker I felt the building shake. The fire trucks were pulling into the bays. The guys were back. Someone, knowing they were on their way back to the firehouse, had sent out an order for a dozen pizzas from the local Italian place. The pizza boxes were stacked like magazines on the bar in the great room. The heady scent of pepperoni and sausage filled the air. I stood in the hallway. I was going to go home, but I could hear footsteps in the stairwell and knew that all the men who had just fought a fire were now coming back to replenish themselves. I opened the door to the stairwell and could hear the sound of heavy bunker boots. I could hear voices.

  “Fuckin’ A,” someone said.

  “Fuckin’ fire,” someone else said.

  “There better be some fuckin’ thing to eat up here,” another voice called out.

  I slipped back into the ladies’ room. I didn’t want to go against the tide of firemen heading upstairs. I could smell the sweat on them, the smoke and testosterone pushing the wake in which they walked. Their voices all merged into one. “Fuck, fuckety fuck, fuck you, fuck him, fuckin’ shit, fuck.”

  “Fuckin’ pizza,” someone said ravenously, and when the stairwell was clear I flew downstairs and into my car. I put a Tracy Chapman CD in the player, and reached into my purse and sprayed myself with girly-type floral cologne. I needed some female juju to overcome the tidal wave of manliness that had just swept in the door.

  My first big fire came on Thanksgiving Day, at two in the morning. It was an early winter that year and there was a freezing sleet already covering the branches of the trees and the road. I heard my tone go off, and that the call was for mutual aid from the surrounding towns for a “fully involved structure fire.”

  I missed the ambulance leaving the firehouse and drove to the scene in my own car.

  The roads were slick and my car skidded at every turn. There was no traffic on the road because of the early hour. People lay sleeping snugly in their beds, plump plucked turkeys waiting to be roasted sat in the refrigerators, feasts to be made at daybreak were about to begin.

  I could smell the fire before I saw it; an acrid heavy scent blanketed the still night air. I could see the fire trucks parked up ahead, along with our ambulance. I parked my car as close to the scene as I could and began to trot toward the fire, carrying my jump kit and my oxygen tank. My feet skidded on the frozen road surface. The closer I got the noisier things became. I could hear the crackle of wood, the harsh sound of water being sprayed from the aerial truck on the flames, and I could hear the sound of four people screaming for their lives.

  A family dressed only in skimpy nightclothes clung to the roof as the flames swirled toward them. Our firemen were trying to get to them, to pull them off the roof to safety. It was so cold that the water being sprayed on the roof froze on contact, leaving long icicles.

  I was terrified. I had never seen a serious fire before, never smelled the black char, heard the crackle and rumble of fire eating a building from the inside out, or heard the fire chiefs screaming out orders to the men.

  For a moment I stood hypnotized. I couldn’t go forward, and there was a great primitive drive in me telling me to run fast, away from the danger. As the two forces battled, I stood stuck in place, wanting to move forward to help and yet wanting to get far away to safety. With a grunt of determination I started edging forward. I was well behind the fire line but I felt that the flames were going to reach out for me like a fiery hand, grab me, and pull me up to the roof. My eyes stung, I could feel the charcoal taste deep in my throat. It was cold out but the radiated heat from the fire made my face burn.

  I watched as the men from Georgetown climbed ladders and fought the flames. The house, a gracious old Victorian, had fire coming from every window on every floor. Part of the roof had already collapsed, and the four people (a mother, father, and their two teenagers) screamed and swatted away embers that rained down on them.

  I tried to remember everything I knew about burns, about the severity of different thicknesses, and how to use a table called the Rule of Nines, which measures the size and severity of a burn depending on where it is on the body and if it is on a child or an adult. I searched my memory for treatment of smoke inhalation, and how to use a burn blanket to cover singed flesh. My mouth was as dry as tinder as I approached the ambulance. Bernice was busy getting things inside the rig ready for the people on the roof when they were taken down. Two other ambulances from nearby towns pulled up, standing by in case any of the firemen were injured.

  Firemen do not give up easily. When they start fighting a fire it is hard to tell them to stop. It is the EMTs’ job to monitor their blood pressures, check for oxygen levels and exhaustion, and help make the call that tells them that they are not to go back to the fire because their health is at risk. If you do, you must prepare to be cursed at by them. They do not want to leave.

  Watching our firemen battle the blaze was like watching someone voluntarily going into hell. Fire is tactile; it gets into your pores, in your hair, in your mouth; you can chew on its taste and rub it from your eyes. The closer you get, the more it paws at you, licks at you like a rough-tongued cat. Our men were right above the flames, the roof was about to collapse, and with the aerial truck they were coming in for the final attempt to pull the people off the roof.

  Huddled in the basket atop the aerial truck, the family was slowly lowered down. When they hit
ground level we EMTs took over. Many things beside the fire could still kill them, including hypothermia. They were nearly naked, standing wet and shivering in the winter air. We wrapped them in blankets, we checked their nose hairs to see if they were singed, we wiped their faces with sterile water, and irrigated their eyes, which were inflamed from the smoke. We gave them oxygen and transported them quickly to the hospital—two in our ambulance, two in the ambulance from another town. By the time we returned to the scene it was almost daybreak, but the fire was still raging. The house had crumbled in sections; the outer rim of walls remained, but the floors and interiors were a sick black hole in the center from which smoke still billowed forth.

  I looked at our firemen, we pulled some off the scene to check their vitals. One sounded asthmatic, another spit out charcoal-tinged sputum, another stood by the side of the ambulance and heaved vomit on his boots. Their faces were black with soot and sweat, and their fire jackets smelled like toast.

  It took until noon Thanksgiving Day for the fire to be under control. There was nothing left of the house, it had burned to the ground. The four people had been given clothing to wear at the hospital and were told repeatedly how lucky they had been not to get killed.

  The local paper ran a big story about the fire, and how it was started by a single candle that was not extinguished before the family went to bed. The paper showed the remains of the house, a heap of rubble behind a yellow police rope. There were the usual snapshots of the firemen, which looked like pictures of firemen you have seen a hundred times, guys with hoses spraying water on the flames. The reality of the scene didn’t translate correctly to newsprint.

  I took a souvenir of that fire back home with me. Jumping out of the back of the ambulance onto the asphalt road, I landed so hard I broke three bones in my right foot. My adrenaline was so high it took me until the next day to know I was injured. A bone scan at the hospital confirmed the fractures. I was given a clumsy orthopedic boot to wear and told to stay off my feet. The boot lasted six hours until I unstrapped the Velcro fasteners and threw it to the back of the closet. I took a lot of Motrin and developed an interesting hobble that slowed me down. People were respectful when I gimped toward the ambulance with my “war wound.” It took a full year before I could walk without pain. But I would rather limp around on a broken foot than spend five minutes fighting a fire. It is incomprehensible how people have the bravery to do it.

  13

  There are nights when I hate the radio that sits by the side of the bed. It’s a special police radio that is tuned to the emergency frequency that tones me out when a 911 call comes in. It looks innocuous, like a small black box or a laptop computer, but it has the power to wrench me awake at any hour of the night.

  Most firehouses work in shifts. During your shift you live at the firehouse, eat with your fellow firemen, watch TV, knit, or do whatever you can do to occupy your time between calls. Georgetown is different. There aren’t enough volunteers to fill a shift roster, so the alternative is a simple one; everyone is on duty all the time. As long as I am near my pager or the radio in my upstairs bedroom, or the two-way radio in the car, I can be called out.

  Before I go to bed I stare at the radio and try to psyche it out, challenging it to let me sleep through the night instead of rudely pulling me awake. It sits on a round glass-topped table that has a luxuriously woven blue and white tablecloth I bought in Provence. Also on the table is a crystal and sterling silver shaker filled with talc that scents the bedsheets, and a pile of art books because I love to look at Pre-Raphaelite paintings of beautiful ivory-skinned women with flowing red hair before I go to bed. There is also an amethyst glass Victorian dish shaped like a lady’s hand that holds a Catholic holy medal, given to me by a friend. All this is on my side of the bed, not Michael’s side. It is my altar to calmness and femininity, to lovely gentle thoughts and shelter by a kind God. And then there is the radio.

  I climb into bed, which has a fluffy duvet and thick square pillows in ruffled shams. In the winter there are flannel sheets, in the summer crisp white eyelet percale. The window is cracked open, I can hear an owl hooting outside. My house is on the top of a hill and my bedroom window is eye level with the tops of the tall trees, which creates a mystical floating effect when it’s dark and the moonlight plays off the branches.

  I settle into bed, but I am not calm. I may be exhausted but I am not calm. I am weary, weary of the box sounding the two long notes followed by the five short beeps that means I have to get up and get dressed and run out the door.

  It takes me a while to forget about the box; sometimes I say a prayer asking that I can sleep through the night.

  Some people can wake up fast. I am not one of them. When I wake up I feel older and more fragile than I do during the day. My hands shake, I always have to pee, my knees hurt, my mouth is dry. I have to locate my glasses, my watch, and my EMT jumpsuit that I lay out on a chair by the bed. Going on a call in the middle of the night is especially tricky. It is hard to know how to dress properly. Say there is an automobile accident involving an elderly person. It is winter and you might be standing out in the road for an hour or more while the person is extricated from the car. During this time you will freeze if you are not wearing layers of clothes, heavy shoes, socks, a hat, gloves, the works. But in the back of the ambulance the heat is on, and because the elderly are always cold and this one is in shock, you crank it up. As your patient is starting to feel comfortable, you are peeling off your winter wear, desperate to cool off. The back of the rig is often littered with clothes.

  The worst calls are on bitter winter nights, cold stone gray ones with a freezing sheet of drizzle outside. Connecticut has a lot of these. I am in bed, in the flannel sheets, submerged up to my neck in blankets and teddy bears and sweet-smelling down pillows. The tone goes off. I bolt upright, and switch on the light to see the pad and pencil I keep next to the bed so I can scribble down the location of the call. Michael wakes up, too, groans, and buries his head under his pillow. “Turn it down,” he bellows, even though I have the radio on the lowest setting. I turn off the light and try to get dressed in the dark. Michael is a very light sleeper and once he has been woken up he can’t get back to sleep. At 2:30 in the morning he will trudge downstairs to make a cup of coffee as I am rushing out the door. He gives me a long-suffering look, as I mumble apologies.

  I have developed tricks to make the night calls more palatable. I always grab a hit of orange juice from the fridge on the way out, so I can pump up my blood sugar. I keep my car as neat and well stocked as the ambulance so I can easily locate my rubber gloves, masks, and goggles in the dark. And then of course there are the CDs that make the transition from bed to car bearable.

  I have a special collection of EMT CDs. I have chosen kick-ass Southern rock and roll for speeding along a dark road with a flashing blue light on. Black Oak Arkansas’s rendition of “Jim Dandy” sets my heart pumping. Old doo-wop is great too: I sing “Rama Lama Ding Dong” as I fly around the curves. But then if I want to wallow in the whole blue muck of sickness there is Van Morrison’s rendition of “TB Sheets,” which gets me ready for the deathly rot that waits at the end of the driveway I’m about to pull into.

  Not all night calls are bad. On a summer night it can be fun to cruise back from the hospital at 2 A.M. with the windows of the ambulance open. The breeze ruffles our light EMT windbreakers as the ambulance crew walks into McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Donuts with our two-way radios blathering and our stethoscopes sticking out of our pockets. The perfect sameness of fast food places is soothing. I used to think it was ghoulish to eat after a call, but now I know how much energy a call takes out of us, and this is our refueling stop. I love the cop-EMT lingo (Dunkin’ Donuts is “double delta”) and I love having to choose between twenty different doughnuts that all taste the same but have spangles and swirls of different-colored frostings on them.

  On nights like this I go back to bed slowly, lie on top of the sheets, and think of how happ
y I am not to be in the hospital, to be in my own house where it smells nice and the white crisp curtains flutter on the window.

  At Georgetown we are issued EMT jackets when we join. About six months after I joined the fire department, the old jackets were supplemented with state-of-the-art new jackets that form a pathogen barrier between the wearer and any icky stuff coming from a patient. The jackets are expensive; the firehouse paid around $400 apiece for them. They are rubbery on the outside and the inside has a thick thermal liner. I am beyond excitement when I get my new jacket from Bernice, but after wearing it for a few days I revert to my old limp rag of a jacket. It takes only a short time for me to realize the new jackets are hell for menopausal women like me, veritable sweatboxes with arms and a hood. They let no pathogens in, but they also let no air in, and with each hot flash I feel like I am suffocating. Dot has also gotten herself into a snit about the new jackets. It is a man’s size, and the arms hang down to her knees. She complains to Bernice about the jacket, and Bernice throws up her hands. She tells Dot that she can’t order anything with shorter arms, Dot does not want to pay for alterations, and the sweat-inducing expensive blue thing is flung back and forth between them like a hot potato.

  Of course, one of the great things about Georgetown is how lax the dress code is. We are encouraged to wear the new blue jackets to look professional and keep ourselves safe from germs, but what we wear under them is what we happen to be wearing at the time of the call. I have answered calls in the flamenco costume I wear to my weekly dance class, and in a velvet evening dress and good jewelry. I have answered many calls in my pajamas, over which I have thrown a jumpsuit.

  Sartorially, the strangest calls are the ones that take place on Halloween, the night of the Volunteer Fire Department’s annual Haunted House. This event is pure Georgetown, homespun to the hilt. The point of the haunted house is to scare the local kids and then give them a bag of candy. There are other haunted houses in the area, some of them genuinely scary with big budgets for special effects and illusions of smoke and mirrors. About seven miles from Georgetown there is one run by a local produce market that is so intense that grown-ups have been known to faint while inside. It features lifelike “lunatics” who run after you in the dark with chainsaws.