Ambulance Girl

by Jane Stern

  Our haunted house is held in one of the fire engine bays. We cordon off the area with black-painted plywood panels and curtains made of sheets of heavy black plastic. The scariest thing about our haunted house is walking through the door into semidarkness, but what you see, once inside, is pretty tame.

  The first thing you will see is Nancy Davis, a pretty blond EMT with a pert nose, dressed as a witch. Even with a fake wart glued to her green-painted skin, she still looks like a preppy cheerleader. Then you get to Bernice and me. Her specialty is to dress as a mummy. I spend half an hour with her before the haunted house wrapping her in gauze bandages, then we throw some fake blood on for effect.

  My costumes are more conceptual. One year I was a dead Viking, with a face painted gray-blue and a Viking helmet complete with horns. I looked more like a sickly Wagnerian opera singer than a spook. The next year I was a pumpkin-faced spider woman decked out in orange face paint and a black beret with a huge hairy fake spider sewed on the top. Neither Bernice or I look the slightest bit scary. Bernice, the former model, looks hopelessly chic even dressed as a bloody mummy.

  Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. My birthday falls a few days before it, and as a child I always had an orange- and black-frosted birthday cake. What I liked about Halloween was that it was one day out of the year when everyone was supposed to be afraid. It made me feel like I had lots of company. The dark cloud of fear under which I lived, filled with ghosts of parental misdeeds, divorces, and loneliness, was mirrored back at me by images of skeletons and gravestones and monsters coming out of their graves. On October 31, the whole world jumped at the sound of footsteps on the staircase, and a thumping heart was the norm.

  Bernice and I stand together and for four hours go “woooooooo” or “boooooooo” as people walk by us, and we move our hands like talons to try to look scary. We chase little kids around and really turn on the juice for smug teenagers who come in and make us feel like middle-aged soccer moms in cheap costumes. What is in the back of our minds is that if a 911 call comes in we must abandon our post at the haunted house. We will rip off as much of our costumes as we can, but it is more than possible that we will still have semipainted faces or be covered in fake blood. We always hope that we will not get a psychiatric patient that night who will see monsters jumping out the back of the ambulance to get him.

  I find it comforting that the Georgetown Haunted House is so low-tech. I wouldn’t admit this to Bernice, but I would be too scared to go into a haunted house that I had not seen constructed from scratch. I have to know where the exits are and what lies around each corner. Knowledge replaces terror for me, and instead of being afraid I can now safely watch one of the Heibeck brothers’ young sons lying on a table, covered with raw chicken livers, screaming as if he is having live surgery performed on him. I love seeing our shy and modest chief walking around as the straw man from The Wizard of Oz, giving candy to little kids. I love hearing the very tidy and sanitation-conscious Bernice complain that the tub we have set out for the tiny tots to bob for apples is hideously unsanitary—“a real pathogen menace,” she concludes.

  Maybe most of all I love watching Mark Svenson, one of our firemen-EMTs, and the assistant chief of the department, dressed as a magician and doing card tricks and waving his magic wand for the little kids in the adjoining room where they bob for apples. Mark is gentle, kind, and brave, a family man with children of his own. Mark is also battling a life-threatening illness that slowly disables him despite chemotherapy and other heavy curatives. This is scarier than any illusion in any haunted house. I want Mark to wave his wand and make his disease go away. The kids giggle as he swoops his black shiny cape and tips his top hat at them. Tonight magic rules. Fake blood is easier to control than the real stuff. We are masters of what is scary within the walls of the haunted house. We can start it and we can stop it, unlike out there, when the tone goes off and real life takes hold.

  14

  The worst calls are for sick or dying children. When the tone goes off and the dispatcher gives that message, we all race out the door extra fast.

  It is late spring and Georgetown proper and the four surrounding towns that we cover have started to wake up from the long winter hibernation. Gas grills have been wheeled out on decks, pool covers removed, lawn furniture taken from the garage and sponged off. Mud season, what New Englanders call the mucky months, March and April, has dried up and the buds of the trees have begun to form bright green leaves. It is a pretty time, but not when 911 suddenly sends you out to an address where a child has drowned.

  Drowning itself is a weird thing. If we get to you in time, with the right kind of maneuvers and chest compressions we can get the water out of your lungs and get you breathing again. If you drown in freezing water it has an insulating effect, sending you into a frozen stupor where you still might be able to be brought back to life. The EMT motto is, you are not dead until you are warm and dead, meaning if you are pulled out of a frozen pond with a body temperature of 89, we will keep working on you until you warm to room temperature. At that point, if you still insist on being dead, well, we can’t help you.

  The tone goes off. The announcement that follows is grim. “Baby found floating facedown in swimming pool.”

  I have been sitting at the typewriter, working on a column for Gourmet. When I hear what the call is for, I don’t waste time. I know the road this call is on, so I do not have to look at the map. I plug my blue lights in and I am flying. I don’t need music to get the adrenaline going; a baby floating facedown in a swimming pool is enough to set every fiber of my body on code blue.

  When I get to the address I see that the ambulance has arrived a few minutes before me. I jump out of my car, grab my jump kit filled with lifesaving tools, and run to the side of the house where I see Bernice and a few of the firemen. They are standing around looking rather annoyed. I cannot imagine what has happened. This is the kind of call that sets us all into high gear, and nobody is moving. Breathlessly I run up to them. “Where’s the kid?” I ask. One of the guys flicks an index finger over his shoulder and points to a big damp lump covered with a blanket. Whatever it is is obviously wet and dead. If it is a baby, it is the biggest baby in the world. From inside the house I hear a man’s high-pitched wails. He is howling like someone whose baby has just perished. I don’t get it. I walk over to the lifeless mass and take a deep breath. I peel the blankets back carefully. I am afraid of what I will see. I have steeled myself to see a dead child. The first thing I see is a huge black nose. I peel the sheet back farther and I see wet fur and two big ears. I lift the blanket off and see a gigantic dead Great Dane. The dog must weigh 175 pounds dry.

  “My babbbbbyyyyyyy,” comes the howling from inside the house.

  “What the hell?” I ask Bernice, who is collecting her things, ready to drive the ambulance home.

  “He called 911 and said his baby was floating lifeless in the swimming pool and that is the way it was dispatched. His baby is a dog, and it fell in the pool and probably had a heart attack. The firefighters fished it out, but we can’t take it away; we can’t put that thing in the ambulance.”

  Bernice and the firemen on call today are not animal people. They don’t understand that this huge dead dog was his baby. I own big dogs, too, and, not having children of my own, I cannot imagine any greater or more maternal feeling than I have for them. “Let me go up and talk to him,” I say as they load the ambulance and pull out of the driveway back to the firehouse. I walk into the house and see a distraught man with carefully plucked eyebrows wearing a caftan. The house smells heavily of potpourri and I see a small replica of Michelangelo’s David on the coffee table.

  There is now another car on the scene. It belongs to Alice, the town dog warden. Alice is a gruff lady with hair styled like a 1950s hoodlum. She knows I like animals and we have always gotten along. She is trying to comfort the hysterical man, who has now doubled the wallop of his grief by thinking about what his live-in boyfriend will do w
hen he comes home in the evening from work.

  “Ruffers was his baby, too,” he caterwauls. “He will kill me when he sees what happened.”

  The police are on the scene and the dog’s owner falls onto a blue-fronted chest, crying hysterically. The cop pries him loose and asks him if he has anyone he can call so he isn’t alone. He gives a phone number. I call it and almost instantly the next-door neighbor comes running over with her four-year-old in tow. The child becomes upset by the apparent stress of the scene and starts crying too.

  The cop asks Alice and me “where the victim is.”

  “The dead dog?” I say, reminding him that this is not a homicide. We point to the lump outside under the blanket.

  We leave the cop behind with the owner, who is still crying and wringing his hands and explaining that his boyfriend will go ballistic when he finds out the dog died under his watch. “Can you help me transport it?” Alice asks me. “I have a stretcher in the back of my van.” I walk to the van with her and she pulls out a two-foot metal stretcher that maybe would accommodate a beagle.

  “Hmmm,” we say in unison, and realize the only way we are going to get the dog into the van is by carrying it. Wet, we estimate it weighs close to 200 pounds. It is truly dead weight and it is also slippery.

  We don’t want the owner to see us dragging the dog across the lawn by its hind legs, its head hitting rocks, and now the four-year-old neighbor has wandered out to watch what we are doing.

  “Go inside, little girl,” I say.

  “No,” she says, and stands watching us.

  “It’s up to us,” I say, and Alice nods in agreement.

  She picks up the dog’s head. I get his back end, the sheet begins to slip off, his big pink tongue lolls out.

  “Nice doggie,” the toddler says.

  By inches we creep to the back of the van. It takes twenty minutes of slowly walking, putting the dog down, getting our breath back, and starting again until we get there. We open the van’s hatchback and realize that there is not enough room for the dog. It is filled with all manner of lead lines and collars and the mess of dog warden paraphernalia.

  We spend another twenty minutes moving Alice’s canine control tools into the back of my car. We make room for the dog and, on a count of three, we manage to hoist him into the back of the van.

  The four-year-old has watched our every step. “What’s wrong with the doggie?” she asks.

  “He’s asleep,” I say at the same time Alice says, “He’s dead.” The kid seems oblivious to both answers.

  Once we stuff the dog in the back of the van, Alice says, “Meet me at the Georgetown Animal Hospital.”

  By the time we get there, Alice has called ahead and two vet tech assistants with a large metal stretcher on wheels are waiting to take the dog inside through the back door. They deposit the dog on the surgical table without the sheet and I see how nice he is. I can imagine becoming very attached to this dog when he was alive. I pet his lifeless head. “Good boy,” I mutter under my breath. “All dogs go to heaven,” I add. I hope this is true. It is what I would want for my “babies.”

  I never knew when I became an EMT that I would be called on to rescue a dead dog, but I am grateful that it happened. I wish I could have saved him. It would not be covered by any practice laws or EMT books, but I would have slept better at night. In my secret heart I am an EMT to all creatures.

  15

  One of the calls that really scares EMTs is a tone-out for a CI, which is radioese for a crisis intervention. Usually this means someone has gone crazy and needs to be transported to the hospital, and to be committed. The cops are always on scene at a CI, and the EMTs don’t go in until there is someone with a gun there to protect us. In EMT class, mental illness was always discussed with a gothic “they,” as if the crazy person were not only a whole other species but likely to take the EMT out with them. We were warned never to get physically close to a crazy person, lest they attack. “Watch for people who sit at the edge of the bed when you enter their room, they are likely to spring at you.” Unlike sick people who have all their marbles, crazy people are not usually shown much hand-holding or compassion. If a crazy person continues to act really crazy and puts up a fuss about going to the hospital, the cops come in and handcuff him and ride along in the back of the ambulance with their guns ready in their holsters.

  Coming from a family of nutty civilians and psychiatrists, I was predisposed to have more empathy for the average lunatic than many of my fellow EMTs. For me CIs are very good calls to go on. They are interesting and I know I can be of help. Somehow I know I will have the right thing to say, that I will be soothing and kind.

  Unlike meeting my first dead person, which I dreaded, I was rather thrilled at the idea of meeting the town’s insane folks.

  When my first CI call comes over the radio, I drive with such wild abandon to the scene that the first thing I do on arrival is to smash bumpers with one of the cop cars. He glares at me. “Very nice,” he says sarcastically, and then I walk by him into the building. It is a bright Sunday afternoon, and there are a huge number of people who have turned out for the call. There have to be fifteen people on scene, mostly firemen and police. To find the patient I have to make my way through a wall of firemen and police. “We have enough people upstairs,” one of the firemen says to me as I attempt to push by him. I loiter around for about ten minutes and can see the exasperated looks on the faces of the cops and firemen. “What’s taking so damn long?” they say to each other. “Just throw her in the rig and let’s go.”

  “Her?” I have my opening. Women EMTs are often called on to deal with women patients and I know Bernice is already upstairs with the woman. I am the only other woman on scene. “Let me in.” I push my way through. “This is a woman thing,” I say. I know this is a call that I have to go on; I no longer want to run away from the ambulance.

  The house sits in a desolate wooded area of Ridgefield that Georgetown covers. It is an unusual house, set way back from the road, large stone lions guarding the front door. The inside of the house is very Addams Family chic in its dark and shabby disarray. There is a suit of armor against one wall, portraits of severe-looking New Englanders on another wall. The walls are painted a deep bloodlike maroon.

  I push past six foot six fireman Sean Morris, which is like shoving aside a mastiff guarding an estate gate, and walk up a narrow flight of stairs, and then down a dark hall. The macabre atmosphere inside the house sets my nerves on edge. What kind of crazy person could be waiting in her lair down the hall? I have never seen the cops and firemen look so uncomfortable. I can hear Bernice’s voice coming from a bedroom. I gently knock on the door and enter, prepared to face a demon.

  The CI is an ethereal young woman who looks like she weighs about 100 pounds. Long tendrils of ebony curls reach to her waist. She is wearing a thin blue silk nightgown and I can see goose bumps on her arms. She looks very frail and very cold, sitting on the edge of the bathtub in the bathroom. Mostly she looks terribly sad.

  “Hi,” I mutter, and look to Bernice to fill me in, give me a clue what she needs me to do.

  “This is Rebecca,” Bernice says in a soft voice. “She is not feeling very well, and we think it is a good idea that she go to the hospital and talk to somebody.”

  Rebecca, perched on the edge of the tub, has no weapon, and unless she is going to stab us with her toothbrush I see nothing around that looks dangerous.

  Rebecca’s husband walks into the room. He is at least thirty years older than she is; his head is covered with a wild shock of orange-red hair. He is in a heavy sweat, red in the face. “Becca, I want you to go with them now!” he says. His words make her cringe.

  I get up and walk him to the door. I don’t like the way he looks. “Do you feel all right?” I ask him.

  “No,” he says. “I do not.”

  I whip out the blood pressure cuff and my stethoscope from my jacket pocket, take his arm, and pump up the black rubber bulb. His blood
pressure is 190 over 110. “Why don’t you sit down?” I say. “Is your blood pressure always high?”

  “Yes,” he says curtly, the inference being that life with Rebecca would make anyone ill.

  From the corner of my eye I can see our assistant fire chief, Marty Heibeck. In the crook of his arm he holds a tiny baby. He is attempting to jiggle it to sleep as it rests on his thick muscular bicep. With his buzz-cut hair, thick wrists, and gray mechanic’s pants, he looks nothing like Mary Poppins.

  I walk into the nursery where he is standing. He looks wildly relieved to see me, and hands me the baby.

  “Cute!!!” he says. The Heibeck brothers have perfected the art of the one-word sentence.

  From Marty I learn what has happened. The baby was Rebecca’s first child. During the cesarean delivery she suffered a small stroke. When poor Rebecca was released from the hospital two weeks later she went into a serious bout of postpartum psychosis. She called 911 today because she is convinced her husband is trying to kill the baby.

  “Knife,” Marty indicates to me when I ask how she thought her husband was going to kill it.

  Poor Rebecca is so stressed out physically and mentally that she has lost the ability to differentiate truth from fantasy. Once the cops determine that her husband is not trying to kill the baby and realize that Rebecca has crossed the line of sanity, the ambulance is called to take her to the hospital.