Ambulance Girl

by Jane Stern

  The baby I am holding is asleep. I place him gently back on his bed.

  Marty strokes the red fuzzy hair with his thick thumb, stained dark with motor oil.

  “I’m going back in the room with Bernice,” I tell him.

  Rebecca is still sitting on the edge of the tub. The cops and firemen are getting antsy. They want her handcuffed and forced into the ambulance. Bernice and I want to finesse the situation; we want her to walk willingly with us out to the rig.

  The negotiations start. “I need a sweater,” Rebecca demands.

  We agree that this makes sense. I go to the closet and find one and hand it to her.

  “I can’t leave the baby alone,” she says, pointing out to the hallway, where she imagines her husband is waiting for her to leave.

  “Marty Heibeck is watching your baby, he is rocking him to sleep,” I say.

  “You know Marty,” Bernice says. “From Heibeck’s Garage? Everyone knows Marty.”

  “Yes,” Rebecca says contemplatively. “I know who he is.”

  Marty Heibeck is the man everyone in the community calls on for any crisis that requires brute strength. As wide as he is tall, solid brawn, Marty is exactly who you would want guarding your baby if you believed he was in danger.

  “You can’t leave my husband alone with the baby, do you understand?” she says again.

  “Your husband will be coming to the hospital with you. The baby will stay here, and we will call a neighbor or a friend and have them come over and watch the baby,” Bernice says, continuing the negotiations.

  “I don’t want him in the ambulance with me,” Rebecca says.

  “Then he will follow behind you in your car,” I say.

  “No good, what if he sneaks back to the house and kills the baby?”

  “That is why Marty is here,” I say.

  While impatient cop feet shuffle in the hallway, Bernice and I go around in illogical circles until slowly Rebecca stands up from the tub. She is so weak she clutches the wall as she rises.

  Bernice helps her on with her sweater. “There, now,” she says. “Let’s go downstairs and take a ride to the hospital.”

  “Don’t let him see me leave,” she says about her husband.

  I walk out first, take her husband by the shoulder, and lead him into another room and close the door.

  “I want to take another blood pressure reading on you,” I say.

  “You do know she is insane,” he says.

  “Do you have any heart problems?” I ask.

  “Angina,” he replies.

  “Are you having chest pains now?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says. His blood pressure is even higher than before.

  “Why don’t you let us call a second ambulance and we will have you taken to the hospital as well,” I say.

  He is adamant that this is not going to happen.

  “When you get to the hospital, tell the doctor what your blood pressure reading is,” I tell him, writing it down on a slip of paper.

  “Let’s go!” I hear one of the firemen’s voices call out. Bernice has successfully gotten Rebecca to walk on her own, unhandcuffed, down the stairs and into the ambulance. Lying on the cot, with her hair streaming out in waves, she reminds me of the tragic and beautiful Ophelia, decimated by mental anguish.

  Bernice and one of the cops are in the back of the rig. I go back into the house. It is suddenly very still and empty. I walk up the stairs and see Marty holding the baby.

  “A friend is coming over from next door in a few minutes,” I tell him.

  He looks relieved. He bounces the baby and strokes its head. “Cute,” he says again.

  “Very cute,” I sigh. For a moment I imagine that I am married to Marty Heibeck and this is our house and this is our baby. It is the kind of weird intimacy that comes with the EMT job. Suddenly you find yourself in someone else’s house, in their private quarters, holding their babies, looking at their stuff.

  Mr. and Mrs. Marty Heibeck and family, I think to myself. Of course I would instantly redecorate the living room.

  “See ya later, Marty,” I say, breaking off the fantasy and letting myself out the front door.

  “ ’Bye,” he says.

  I look at my bumper, which has a good ding from the cop car I hit when I arrived. I drive home thinking about the baby. Will anyone ever tell him what happened to his mother when he was newly born? Or will this episode be expunged from the family history? Family secrets scare me. When I was a kid the odd behavior of my relatives was always whispered under the breath. No one ever came out and said, “Grandma really is insane.” One relative who committed suicide was referred to so obliquely that in my childish imagination I took all the references to his “leaving a family behind” and “acting very unusual” and imagined he had run away and joined the circus. When I was thirty-five I found the “baby book” my mother had kept about my birth and formative years. It was not neatly scrapbooked but haphazardly crammed with dozens of greeting cards, letters from doctors, and notes about medications that made it quite obvious to me that my own birth had been fraught with maternal depression.

  I see my mother’s strange left-slanted handwriting in the book. Under “Baby’s First Week” she wrote about me, “cries all the time.” I can feel my mother’s desperate coming apart after my birth by looking at the words. I was her first and last child. Back when I was born women didn’t talk about being terrified and unhappy after a child was born.

  I am more shaken than I realize by the CI. Tom Knox listens gently and when I get up from the couch to leave, in tears, he puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder. Tom often refers to the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, who postulated that craziness is not an us versus them thing, but instead places all people, from the sanest to the craziest, on a continuum. Mental illness is shades of gray. But after a really bad call I want to detach myself from craziness, get as far away as possible. I want to live only in the pure unsullied white. Gray seems dangerous, it slips too easily into black.

  16

  The worst crisis intervention calls are for suicides; even worse are the failed suicides—people who drink drain cleaner or overdose on pills or shoot half their heads off. Sometimes we catch them before they die; sometimes it is too late.

  Once I was called to a house late at night. The estranged husband of a woman had been calling his wife’s home for two days and couldn’t get an answer. He finally called the police. The police called us. When we got there the woman was five days dead. She had started to decompose. She looked like she was made of melting saddle leather. The house was a mess, the physical embodiment of depression. On the mirror in the bathroom in red lipstick she had drawn a happy face, and underneath scrawled “See you on the other side.” It made me sick to my stomach.

  It is not just the dead whose tableaux stick in my mind. Sick people’s rooms and the smell of them seep into my clothes and burn an image into my brain.

  The world of the very sick is a deceptively cozy one, sort of like a nightmare nursery for grown-ups. Sick people wear robes that are pink and fuzzy, greeting cards and flowers line their dresser tops. But instead of the nursery smell of a freshly washed baby there is the smell of used bedsheets, of medicines, of worry.

  When we arrive at the house of a sick person we are often led to the bedroom. If the patient is very sick, possibly dying of cancer or maybe ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), they are often in a hospital bed placed in the living room, the centerpiece around which all life revolves.

  Sickrooms tend to be extremely messy or extremely neat. The messy ones boast piles of magazines, books strewn about, volcanoes of pill bottles, sick-person things like spoons coated with sticky medicines and old pajamas piled on a chair. But the tidy rooms are no less unsettling. Many houses have the sick person in bed in a blank room with a religious icon above the bed and maybe a clock radio for comfort. It is hard to imagine how boring it would be to spend any time in this room, blank and lonely as a grave.

 
When we go to a sick person’s house we ask to see all the medicines a person is taking. People either have medicines strewn everywhere or they have no idea what or where their medicines are.

  On one extreme are the caretakers who not only have all their ward’s medicine bottles lined up like little soldiers in a row, but have computer printouts on hand of exactly what and how much of it the sick person is taking.

  The other extreme are the people who tell you, “I take a pink pill for my heart and a green one for my liver.” They have no idea what the medicines are, just that they came from a doctor and are expensive.

  In a third category are people whose medicines are homegrown. You would be surprised in these days of alternative health practices what weird stuff people ingest in an effort to cure themselves.

  I am toned out to a pretty pink house with white shutters and a white picket fence in Redding. Bernice has already beaten me to the call. This time is different than others because the ambulance has already left with the patient, leaving Bernice behind.

  “In here,” Bernice calls for me when she hears my footsteps, and motions to a bedroom off a narrow hallway. There is a strange stench coming from the room. Not the now familiar smell of a sick person, or soiled underpants or layers of room deodorizer covering pee-soaked bedding that we so often gag on. This is a musty new odor, like sweat socks or damp old shoes. My eye is drawn to the top of her bureau, where there are Mason jars filled with brown fungus and what looks like malevolent toadstools. Hideous-looking warty growths flourish in the mini terrariums. In a pan is a huge fungus, like the top of a mushroom, soaking in water.

  I look around the bedroom. I go into the adjoining bathroom. Unlike its prim exterior, the inside is messy, with magazines strewn about. I look at the selection of magazines. They are all related to herbal remedies and natural foods. I have heard of Prevention, but the other ones are obscure and new to me.

  “What the hell happened?” I ask.

  “As best as I can figure, the lady who lives here was trying to treat herself for something and she has been taking herbs and things. She obviously took too much or mixed the wrong things together. I don’t know what she took; she was comatose when we got here.” Bernice points to the big fungus in the pool of water. “See if you can find a container and let’s bring it to the hospital.”

  I go into the kitchen and look for a Tupperware container, but I can’t find one. I can’t find any containers or plastic bags. There are ecological brown paper bags, but I can’t use those. I find a cooking fork, big, with two long prongs. I go back into the bedroom and stand above the huge brown floating fungus. Is it alive? I am scared of it. Am I imagining it is pulsating? I can’t stand the thought of touching it, much less imagine eating this nasty-looking wad of goo.

  There is a small plastic wastebasket in the corner of the room. I pick it up and shake out the Kleenex and whatever else is in it. I stick the fork through the brown glob. It breaks in half; I see its underside has gills. It appears to be a giant mushroom. I stab at it again. I think of the movie Alien, where the scary thing flies in the guy’s face and slithers down his throat. Instinctively I use my other hand to cover my lower face. I finally get a good hunk of the thing on the fork and slide it into the wastebasket.

  “So you think it was an overdose of this?” I ask Bernice, pointing to the brown thing sloshing about in the wastebasket. I am terrified it is going to fall over. I steady it with my hand.

  “That, or she combined it with something,” Bernice says.

  We carefully place the wastebasket in the back of my car, open all the windows, and drive to the hospital.

  EMTs love arriving at the ER with something unusual. If you bring in someone who has a stomachache or has twisted his ankle you will probably not be acknowledged with eye contact by the staff. They will take your paperwork and get the stats from you and that’s it, but the stench of what we have brought in the wastebasket already has their attention. The stink is slowly filling the ER, overpowering the medicinal smell of the hospital.

  “We think the patient that arrived here about half an hour ago in the Georgetown ambulance ate some of this,” Bernice tells the nurse.

  The nurse looks into the pail and looks up at me. “You’re kidding,” she says. I shrug. I can tell she is impressed.

  “I don’t think I’m ever going to the health food store again,” Bernice says as we walk outside the hospital to my car. Before we climb inside Bernice takes out a bottle of cologne from her purse and gives a few blasts inside my car. The stink seems to be growing exponentially. I think of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry’s car takes on a bad smell, which cannot be removed, from a stinky valet parking guy. When I get home I pull out some “miracle” product that I bought from a late-night TV ad. I mix up a bucket of it and scrub the inside of my car with a stiff brush. In the morning it smells normal.

  17

  The first day I attended the class that would turn me into an EMT, each student was called upon to stand up, face the class, and tell all assembled why he or she had chosen to take the training. I remember saying that when a bad situation happened at home or on a highway, I felt like I wanted to help but didn’t know what to do. I was not alone. Many people in the class expressed the same sentiments about being unable to cope effectively with emergencies, and wanting that to change. Like me, they wanted to be master of the sudden crisis, to control chaos.

  I think back to the moment on the plane that was stuck on the runway and how I felt utterly powerless. All I could do was wait, like a dog with its head cocked waiting for the master’s voice, for someone in the control tower to give the go-ahead to the mystery pilot behind the captain’s closed cockpit. Then and only then would the plane move. Only then would I be all right.

  I fought hard against the very concept of being powerless. Michael was so much more evolved than I was in this regard. An alcoholic, he had stopped drinking and had been sober for two years. He talked to me about his AA group and the twelve steps. Number one was admitting you were powerless. I hated the first step and could see no purpose in it. Fine if he wanted to relinquish trying to be the boss of things, but I, for one, was sure that if I tried hard enough I could even get planes to move on the runway.

  Michael’s hobby is riding horses, a high-risk endeavor. Many times, especially at night, I imagined him thrown off his horse, lying alone, somewhere in the deep woods, and no one to help him. “You must carry a cell phone,” I urged. “You must carry an all-purpose knife to cut the reins or your clothes if you need to. . . . Wear a helmet,” I implored. Occasionally if Michael came home with stories of his horse acting wild, my eyes would grow to saucer size and I would command, “Sell the horse. It is the only sensible thing to do.” Of course, the more I complained, the faster Michael rode his horse, just as every time I explained in graphic detail the hideous things that happen in a car wreck, the faster he drove. Michael did as he pleased. I was powerless over his behavior. My trying to control him made him more reckless. Not that my suggestions were bad, but I made it clear that I felt I was in charge of keeping Michael safe and alive. Being an EMT made me even more of a control freak. I had an advanced CPR card in my wallet that declared me a “professional rescuer,” and I believed my own press.

  It took a personal crisis to make me realize that even with the best of help, bad things can happen to good people. We are all powerless.

  The man who owned the barn where we boarded our horses was a father figure to us. Michael and I adored John, sixty-nine years old and still working twelve-hour days, shoeing horses and hauling hay. He was our fount of knowledge about horses and also about people. As a horse trader, he could psyche out a weakling or a phony right away. He was a rare thing, a real Connecticut cowboy. He dressed like a working cowboy, in Wranglers, boots, and Carhartt barn coats, and had ridden the East Coast rodeo circuit. He was rumored to be a good trick rider in his younger days.

  John was tireless, although he seemed to live on a diet of Johnny Walke
r Black Label scotch, coffee from the nearby 7-Eleven, and Copenhagen chewing tobacco. He must have eaten, but none of us ever caught him in the act. He felt so much like family that Michael and I used to save up our frequent flyer miles and once a year we would take him with us out West, to see the real ranges and prairies that he had only heard of or seen in movies. More horse than man, he amused us with his equine-eyed travelogues. He hated the bare desert of southern Arizona: “Not a tree to stand under or any water,” he said. He didn’t like the trails of rocky Oregon: “Lose too many horseshoes,” he grumbled. But he was enraptured with the bounty of hay he saw being harvested in Washington State. “Now that’s pretty,” he said with a sigh.

  Then one night when he was at his horse barn, cleaning out stalls at the end of a long workday, his brain hemorrhaged and he lay at the bottom of a flight of stairs for hours bleeding intercranially until someone found him.

  The EMTs were called, not Georgetown’s but those of the town where he lived, and they came to get him. They did a good job because they got him to the hospital alive and in time for the neurosurgeons to operate on him and stop the bleeding in his brain.

  The day after this incident Michael and I went to the hospital to see John. His head was shaved and bandaged, his arms still tanned from the late-summer sun, his muscles still bulging from a lifetime of hard physical labor.

  It took two weeks for John to come out of his coma, and then the damage was assessed. His left side is paralyzed, he needs to be fed with a tube, his memory is gone. He doesn’t remember he likes Copenhagen chewing tobacco or the rodeo, or pretty blondes with long legs, or balanced ride saddles from Colorado. “Saved” by the quick-thinking EMTs in the ambulance, he had gone from the master of his horsey domain to a cripple who will never be able to rise up on his own two legs from a nursing home bed.

  I wear my EMT jacket to the hospital to visit him the day after the stroke. It is protection for me, a security blanket that gives me the illusion that I have some control over this bleak situation. I am, after all, “Ambulance Girl”—invincible, like Wonder Woman in a flowing cape and tights. Of all the people on the planet, John is the last one who should have wound up as a lifelong invalid. Of course, there is nothing I can do but stand by the bedside and stroke his callused hand.