by J. D. Glass
Synopsis
Who rescues the rescuer when there is no 911 for the soul? Blood is…“Never let rescuer number one become victim number two” is one of the very first lessons Victoria Scotts, “Tori” to her friends and family, learns as an EMT. Blood is…Caught between family legend and her cousin, Nina, ten years her senior, a musician and a legend in her own right. Tori may be the oldest of her siblings, but never first … not with her family, not with the woman she lives with. Blood is...Despite the censure of the mother she supports emotionally and financially, Tori forges her own path as an EMT in the New York City 911 system. In the process she discovers a true calling for what she does, a deep and abiding love for the city and people she serves, and perhaps for the first time in her life, after a series of dangerously charged erotic encounters, a real connection to someone who cares for her because of who she is, and not only for what she can do. Blood.When a good faith attempt to render aid, comfort, and compassion goes horribly wrong, leaving Tori sick and scarred, she must question the validity of her relationships, the ties of flesh and those that transcend it, her faith in the innate goodness of people. Hardest of all, she must face for herself the natural, inevitable…why.
Red Light
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Red Light
© 2007 By JD Glass. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-465-2
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First Edition: June 2007
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Credits
Editors: Shelley Thrasher and Stacia Seaman
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design By Sheri([email protected])
By the Author
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Red Light
X
Acknowledgments
Beta readers: Lieutenant Christine Mazzola, EMT-P FDNY (medical control); Dr. Cait Cody, MD; Eva; Paula Tighe, Esquire; Ruth Sternglantz. You guys rock—and thanks for being with me every step of the way.
Thanks always to Willie Wright, EMT-P FDNY; Joanne Wright, EMT EDT; Linda Doering, EMT, Physical Therapist, Masters; Kathy Finkelstein, EMT RN; Dr. Pamela Carlton, PhD, EMT-P: for teaching so many to save even more.
Thank you, Cate Culpepper, for incalculably valuable advice.
Thanks always to Radclyffe, Shelley Thrasher, and Stacia Seaman for patience, for guidance, for support and confidence.
Dedication
To my sisters and brothers who ride the rig and answer the call, every time: “We be of one blood, thou and I.” (Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book)
“I solemnly pledge to consecrate my life to the service of humanity;
I will give to my teachers the respect and gratitude that is their due;
I will practice my profession with conscience and dignity;
The health of my patient will be my first consideration;
I will respect the secrets that are confided in me, even after the patient has died;
I will maintain by all the means in my power, the honour and the noble traditions of the medical profession; My colleagues will be my sisters and brothers;
I will not permit considerations of age, disease or disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient;
I will maintain the utmost respect for human life;
I will not use my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat;
I make these promises solemnly, freely and upon my honour.”
Declaration of Geneva 2006
Shane, te adoro.
“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
Helen Keller
I Don’t Need a Hero
I don’t drive around in a fancy car, though the rig I’m in cost a couple of good pennies. I don’t carry a gun, because my weapon of choice in this battlefield is what I carry in my brain and what my hands can remember to do between the spurts of adrenaline that are causing microtears in my blood vessels. I’ve got an O2 cylinder and a valve, some funky plastic parts, and a mattress on wheels.
I don’t have any super powers. I’ve run into fires and back out again, looked down the barrel of more than one gun, had knives in my face and bullets over my head, panicked, checked and double-checked to make sure I haven’t been stuck with a syringe that’s fallen out of a pocket during a call.
I’m no fuckin’ superhero—it’s just my job, and I’m glad to do it, because I’m paying my dues, penance, like everyone else here.
Been calm while picking brains off a windshield and went for a long walk in the freezing wind to get the why out of my head. Held the hand of a little girl whose mom sold her for crack—and her mom laughed at her tears. Comforted the dying. Brought the dead back to life twice, and helped witness it start out wet and bloody—but I’m not the only one.
I’m part of a caste, born of Vietnam vets who wanted to do something good for the world when they got back, paramedical and paramilitary. Funny, they say the street is a never-ending war—and it took men and women who’d fought one in a jungle to figure that out.
We hear what people say: EMT, “Empty Mental Troll,” “Extra Man on Truck,” and maybe, just maybe, a few, but not the ones that belong, might fit those descriptions. We joke amongst ourselves: “Every Menial Task,” “Eggcrate Mattress Technician,” and even, for the lucky few, “Earn Money Sleeping.”
We joke because we have to, because we live by a creed. We are bound beyond the Geneva Oath to protect, to heal, to serve; and we are sworn, sworn to each other, sworn to our city and to our people; and even if we don’t get the respect that others who are similarly sworn get, we do just that. Heal. Help. Protect.
We serve the one true religion, follow the one true call: to save life, any life, every life, every time.
Yeah, and if you’re one of us reading this, you know who you are, who we are: part of the brotherhood, the Brotherhood of Blood. We be of one blood, Thou and I.
If you’re not? Don’t worry. I’m around the block, just come back from someone’s first day, worst day, or last day, and I’m having a butt while I sit in my rig, waiting for your call. Don’t think you will? Most don’t think so either, but…everyone does sooner or later; even we have to, whether we want to or not. No one ever wants to.
They say the members of the police department are New York’s finest, and the fire department are the bravest. Know what they call the emergency medical services?
New York City’s best.
Airway
Will the airway stay open on its own? Does anything endanger it?
“God damn, I’m hungry and I am never going to remember all of this shit!” Roy groaned as we sat together in the students’ lounge during a meal break.
“Chill, man. We got through Orson’s class, we’ll get through this, c’mo
n. Do it again: trace the path of a drop of blood from a toe and back,” I urged him, his anxiety reflecting mine. I just hid it for the moment because we had to know this, inside out and backward, and I couldn’t focus if I let him freak out. The only thing that betrayed my nerves was my hand running through the thick brown hair that I kept just shy of shoulder length—a family trait, both the hair and the gesture.
“Yeah, and she says men are evolutionarily inferior because of that whole excretion/reproduction thing,” he reminded me, a worried frown creasing his almost coal-colored forehead.
“Dude.” I laughed, because it was true, she had said that, and so had Baumel and Finkelstein and even the lab assistant in our first year. “I don’t think she meant your brain.”
“Don’t be so sure about that, Scotty,” he shot back, using my nickname instead of calling me Tori like he usually did.
“Okay, from the top, uh, toe.” He grinned and closed his eyes to concentrate. “From the capillaries to the venules, to the veins, dumping into the inferior vena cava…” He went through the drill and got it right.
My turn was all about flow in the heart itself, from right atrium through to the tri-flapped valve, down to ventricle, up through pulmonary valve…yeah, the works. From there, we reviewed the tricky part of the basics: the pulmonary artery is the only one with deoxygenated blood (artery—away!), while the pulmonary vein is the only one that carries oxygenated blood (from the Latin—veni, “come, return”).
There was more, and I was just pulling out another text with a diagram when Kerry announced her arrival by straddling my legs and swooping down for a kiss that was all fuck.
“Hey, baby,” I murmured when she let me up for air.
“You hard?” she asked softly into my ear, her dark blond hair brushing against my lips.
“Mm-hmm,” I answered, “and I’ve got an exam to study for.”
Her light green eyes looked into mine. “Smile, baby,” she said, smoothing my forehead with her fingertips, “you’re scaring Roy.”
Had I sat up straight, I could have peered over her head because, at just over five foot, Kerry was charmingly petite to my 5’9”, somewhat lanky frame, but that would have forced me to change positions—and I was enjoying this too much. Instead, I put the smile she requested on my face and peered around her arm to see Roy for myself. He was studiously ignoring us by reading my notes.
“Are we scaring you, Roy?” I asked.
“Hey, Kerry,” he said, glancing up for a moment, only to frown back down at my handwriting.
“Hiya, Roy,” Kerry answered, still gazing at me.
“Not happy to see me?” she drawled, pressing her hips down and onto my crotch.
God, I couldn’t do this now. I might have unintentionally said that last part out loud.
She was my girlfriend, after all, and normally I was happy to see her, except she just didn’t seem to take this whole thing seriously. My class simply didn’t mean to her what it did to me and Roy: a ticket out—out of student loans and scraping by on a dumb job at the supermarket while trying to maintain a decent GPA at our local City University, the College of Staten Island, otherwise known as CSI. Because it was local, some called it the College of Stupid Idiots, but it was what we could afford, tuition and commute-wise.
Roy worked at a 7-Eleven making the same close-to-minimum wage that I did at the local supermarket I’d worked at since I was in high school, even though I’d graduated three years ago. At least I’d finally been promoted to head cashier.
Now, at the beginning of our junior year, the pressure was on and coming down hard. Roy had a girlfriend and a brand-new baby girl just two months old, and while I didn’t have the baby, I had the babe who needed to know I could take care of her; and I did, every way I could, since we’d moved in together about two months before. Not that we did too bad. I mean, Kerry was a bonds analyst for a major firm, but I wanted to do my part and do it right.
Still and all, though, there was that degree and its accompanying loans and debts—and the accompanying future Roy and I both wanted after the degree. I couldn’t see a way to afford it. My student loans only went so far, and between the apartment and the money I sent my mom every week to help with my sister’s schooling, I didn’t know what I was going to do—I’d already maxed out on everything.
One of our professors had turned us on to this possibility: even on a per-diem basis, EMTs—emergency medical technicians—could get paid pretty well once they got seniority, and our instructors had told us that paramedics made even more. Plus, that training was two years of medical school crammed into thirteen months, which appealed to me. I could skip a whole year of medical school, take the MCAT before finishing undergrad—and go into the classroom with some real-world experience too.
But the only way to get on that train was to ride the bus, as our instructors affectionately (and sometimes not so affectionately) called the ambulance, as an emergency medical technician, BLS: basic life support.
That license was an express ticket to the end of the line, and tonight? We got that ticket punched—by earning our CPR cards.
As important as all of that was, Kerry was living and warm, her cunt separated from me by two layers of denim. I couldn’t deny the body, and I slid down slightly in my seat so Kerry could ride me just that much better—better for both of us, and worse, because I really needed to know this stuff, and in another minute I was going to excuse us and take her by the hand to my car so I could—
“Okay, again: the four valves are…?” Roy asked, bringing my attention back to the matter at hand, the most important matter in the world. My cunt didn’t agree, but again, it was rare that big head and little head were on the same wavelength, at least not when Kerry was around. That was something I still had to get used to.
“The tricuspid, between the right atrium and right ventricle; the pulmonary, between the right ventricle and the pulmonary—” I began to recite from memory, but Kerry interrupted.
“Give it a rest, Tori. Roy, come take a drive and let’s go grab some pizza—you’ve got another hour before class starts again.”
I glanced around Kerry over at Roy—he had just complained a few minutes earlier about being hungry.
“Roy,” I asked, “can you study when you’re hungry? Wanna go grab a bite?”
He sighed and shut the books in front of him, shoving them against the pile on the center of the table.
“Can’t study when I’m hungry, can’t study when I’m”—his eyes rested on Kerry for a moment as she slid ever so slightly against me, and he grinned—“really hungry.”
“Okay, let’s go eat, then,” I said, clapping my hands around Kerry’s waist not only to hold her, but also to still her motion a bit—she was getting me to the point where I was going to cry if I didn’t come soon. Maybe not cry, exactly—but I’d definitely get ornery, and Roy and I had a practical lecture after our exam. I wasn’t looking forward to bandaging my fellow classmates while I fought down a raging hard-on.
“We can take my car,” Kerry offered as I smiled at her. She ran her fingers through my hair—it was starting to get a bit long, I thought. I’d have to take care of that soon.
“No need, baby, we’re just going to the caf,” I said.
Kerry got that look in her eye, the one that meant she disagreed.
“We really do need to study—and we can’t be late for the exam.”
Kerry gave one final hard push against me, her way of making sure I wasn’t late coming home, either, then stood.
“Yeah,” Roy agreed as we collected our various books and papers from the table, including our all-important Brady books, the bible of emergency medicine, and tucked them carefully into our bags. “This is really important, Kerr.”
“It’s all right, guys. You just take it so seriously.”
I stopped, my hands on the clasp of my bag, and straightened to stare at her, surprised. “Kerry, it is serious—people are going to put their lives in our hands.”
She smirked. “Not tonight, they’re not.”
I shook my head. I didn’t know if she thought her eight, almost nine years over me gave her an insight I didn’t have or if she wasn’t interested, but either way, she just didn’t get it.
*
We ate, we studied, then studied some more, and thankfully, the written and practical parts of the exam went well. Two hours later Roy and I had our shiny new cards to slip into our wallets, and we spent the following practical lecture learning how to say “it feels snug” whenever a triangle bandage was applied correctly.
From here on in, Bob, the head instructor, who was not only the founder of this particular EMT school but one of the founders of emergency medical services in the country, reminded us that we would each need to carry to every class an O2 wrench or key (to open the oxygen tanks), medic shears (which were very cool because they could cut right through a penny), and our pocket masks (which would provide a layer of protection between the rescuer and the patient), as well as our stethoscopes.
Even though we used military time for everything, we also had to wear a sweep-hand watch so we could count respirations and pulses against the movement of the little wand, and I wore a Timex on my left wrist so I wouldn’t beat up my favorite Mickey Mouse one my grandmother had given me years ago.
With all the equipment we had to start carrying, I was eyeing the utility belts that some of the instructors wore. I needed to get one soon, I thought; well, that and a decent stethoscope. Toys, I mused to myself, it really was all about the toys.
