Ambulance Girl

by Jane Stern

  Months pass. John lies being tube fed in a hospital bed. His arms and legs atrophy and his once tan body turns a sickly shade of white. He has open bedsores and a sour smell comes from his mouth and his adult diaper. He is too messed up and weak to work the TV remote control.

  After John’s stroke I am thrown back into a depression and a crisis. To my dismay I no longer want to go on EMT calls. I no longer feel I am helping people to live, but rather I am intervening and not allowing them to die when it is their time. I am sure that the EMTs who came to John’s rescue did the best job they could and went home feeling that they had another “save” under their belts. But I saw what was left of him after they turned the tables on his death. I prayed I would never leave anyone in that terrible state between death and life.

  After John’s stroke I am so deeply spooked that I don’t share my feelings with Bernice or anyone else. When the tone goes off I ignore it, make a hundred excuses for why I can’t go. I grow lonely and despondent, sitting once again at home in the dreaded blue bathrobe. I occupy myself by wasting lots of time, watching TV and playing around on the computer. I become an eBay geek, staying up all night logging on to auctions and trawling my favorite categories for hidden treasures that I don’t need and can’t afford. I go to the local discount beauty store and spend a small fortune on all sorts of facial masques and hair treatments, so when the tone goes off I am well greased and wearing a heating cap, or have drying blue clay on my face. Obviously I can’t leave the house this way.

  Personally things are going south fast, too. EMT, which started out as a hobby, has changed my life drastically. It has pulled me up out of a midlife funk and cast me back into a vibrant world. Now, because of what happened to John, I don’t trust the magic anymore. I haunt the familiar shadows of despair. It is August and Tom Knox and his family are going on vacation. “Have a shitty time,” I say as a parting farewell. He gives me the “we will have a lot to talk about in September” look as I push out the door.

  August rolls into September. John is now in a nursing home. Someone has a picture of his stallion taped up above his bed. He was the only person who could ride this wild horse, and now he can’t even stand up. “That’s his horse,” I tell one of the attendants who is cleaning him up. They could not care less. What he was before being here is of no interest to them.

  Tom Knox ups my antidepressant medication. It makes me feel marginally better, although l am plagued again by psychosomatic problems. Thinking of John, my whole left side goes numb and stays that way for a week. I am scared but won’t see a doctor. Michael is as depressed about John as I am. He doesn’t want to talk about the hopelessness of John’s condition. He gets antsy when I bring it up. He doesn’t know the answer to my endless “what will happen to him?” questions. Michael’s immune system is taxed from the stress and worry and when he gets a terrible flu he moves into the guest bedroom to sleep. When his flu gets better he continues to sleep there. “I can’t stand that radio of yours going off in the middle of the night,” he says. Things grow tense between us. I try to lure him back to the bedroom with promises of the radio being so low he can’t hear it, and how I will put crisp sheets on the beds every other day. Nothing works. I go to bed alone in the big master bedroom.

  Like Beaver Cleaver, Michael has filled the guest room with guy stuff: gun magazines, horse books, and sneakers, and it is apparent to me that he is planning to stay there for quite a while.

  Michael has supported my becoming an EMT and now it is backfiring. He resents the intrusion of other people’s emergencies into our private life and I am not enjoying the calls anymore. I am burning out, just as I was told I would, but of course I never believed it would happen to me.

  I have fallen into the habit of bitching about everything and everyone. I am no longer cheerful. When I do go to calls I am angry with patients who are not deathly ill. “Why can’t they just get a friend to drive them to the hospital?” I gripe, and I equally dislike the ones that are truly ill because they stress me out and remind me of John lying in his hospital bed.

  When you expect the worst of people, you get it. In the next few months I shuttle between home and Tom Knox’s office spewing my dissatisfaction. When the tone goes off I am confronted with one nasty situation after another.

  A woman motorcyclist crashes her bike at the intersection in Georgetown. Her skull is cracked and she is a high-priority transport. I work on her like crazy, keeping her calm as she comes in and out of consciousness in the back of the ambulance. I know her and her husband from around town. The day after her accident I see him shopping at the grocery store and ask him how she is. He appears grateful, but says, “The wife and I were just delighted that you ambulance people didn’t steal her watch.” I am speechless at his insensitivity.

  I get the dreaded Mrs. Gernig in the back of the rig. At eighty years old, Mrs. Gernig is a sneaky drunk and a nasty one at that. She would drink and then fall off her chair and push the pendant around her neck to alert 911. There is nothing wrong with her but she still wants to be transported to the hospital. She is what EMTs call a “frequent flyer.” She wants a fuss made over her and wants the ride to the hospital. Mrs. Gernig stinks of liquor so badly that if there were an open flame in the ambulance, she and I would combust.

  In gathering information for the run form I try to be discreet and ask her if she has had “a cocktail,” for which she reams me out royally, making me feel that I will be sued for defamation of character if I don’t immediately shut up.

  Bad karma draws bad karma. I miss all the interesting calls. Tom Knox has made me promise I will not hide out at home. The question is why I bother to go at all. I miss the calls for rosy-cheeked babies who need to have their little button noses wiped, and the grateful handsome folks who send checks to the firehouse after we transport them. Instead I get the eighty-five-year-old man who has been sitting on his couch naked watching TV when he accidentally makes a BM and then moves to another chair, where he sits on his sleeping cat and calls 911. I spend the better part of the next hour picking cat hair out of this old man’s ass crack. I get the calls for the demented spinster sisters who live in a ramshackle house by the railroad tracks with their books and high-falutin’ college degrees framed on the wall. They speak in cultured accents as they recline on sofas reeking of their urine.

  Michael is still holed up in the guest room. Nothing is going right; even my uniform is driving me crazy. The jumpsuit that I wear to night calls has shrunk in the dryer to the point that when I sit down the pants end about twelve inches above my ankles. I look like I am wearing capri pants as I trudge into the hospital pushing someone on a stretcher.

  I start to develop a tremor. I hope it is nerves but I fear it is Parkinson’s disease. I talk to Tom Knox, who sends me to a neurologist. He assures me that it is a benign condition. However, I am so trembly that when I wrap the blood pressure cuff around a patient’s arm, my hands shake so badly that the cuff falls off. When I am stressed, which is now all the time, I look like I am having a palsied fit. If I were a patient I would not allow me to touch me.

  “There are three ways to treat the tremor,” Tom says. “First, cut out caffeine.” As he talks, I look at the row of take-out cups of Starbuck’s coffee on his desk. Tom is legendary at the Starbuck’s near his office because he drinks his coffee with six shots of espresso. I drink one measly cup of coffee a day and am not about to give it up. “Or you can take a beta-blocker,” Tom says. “It will stop the tremors and might lessen your adrenaline rush in situations where you feel panicky.”

  I like the sound of this and I leave the office with a prescription. Beta-blockers are used primarily for people with high blood pressure. They regulate the heartbeat and keep blood pressure from shooting up. But they are also used for stagefright and other conditions where nerves take over and render the person unable to cope. I am wildly excited about finding a drug that will keep me from shaking and also cure my panic attacks. I stop at the drugstore and fill the prescr
iption on the way home, so eager to try it I pop a pill on the spot.

  As soon as I get home the ambulance tone goes off. I jump in the car and drive fast to the house of Stephen Demeter, one of Georgetown’s most highly regarded citizens. Mr. and Mrs. Demeter are in their eighties, both playwrights and part of the original small group of creative people who found their way to rural Connecticut fifty years ago. They are town legends, they live on a gracious farm, their house overflows with art, and sunshine streams in their studio windows.

  Bernice is excited about the call. “Maybe they will invite us back for tea next week,” she says.

  The call isn’t a terrible medical crisis. Mr. Demeter is having trouble with his legs and his home care aide thinks it best he go to the hospital. As we load him into the ambulance, I admire his patrician profile; this man is still handsome at eighty-three. I also notice that I feel extremely odd, as if I don’t have enough blood in my body, numb and spacey and on the verge of being very dizzy as I climb in the back of the rig. Bernice chats with Mr. Demeter as she takes vitals. I start to copy them down on the notepad, but feel like my body is wooden. About seven minutes into the twenty-minute ride to the hospital I am overcome with a huge wave of nausea and dizziness. I have the urge to lie flat; I feel like I will pass out if I don’t. I try to keep it to myself, but with each curve and bump the ambulance takes I feel worse, as if all the blood is draining from my brain. I fight the feeling as best I can and when I can fight it no more I sort of slump onto the side bench in the ambulance that we use to transport a second patient. I lie in this slumped position, trying to not pass out, praying that we will get to the hospital soon. Bernice gives me a concerned look. She has no idea why I have crumpled into a fetal position.

  It’s an odd thing to be sick in the back of the ambulance when you are not the patient. All I want to do is push Mr. Demeter off the stretcher and climb onto the white-sheeted bed. I also want to not be going to the hospital. I know we are heading to a place filled with doctors and nurses but I just want to go home and crawl into my own bed and be left in peace. I am afraid of being sick, of being powerless.

  We unload Mr. Demeter at the ER and I run into the washroom. My face is paste-colored, my collar ringed with sweat. I am pissed off at myself. “Now what’s wrong with you, you asshole?” I say into the mirror at my ghostly reflection. I stagger back outside. Bernice is handing the nurse Mr. Demeter’s chart. “I’m not feeling so well,” I mumble. “I think I’ll go outside and get some air.”

  The ride back to the firehouse seems endless. Bernice takes my blood pressure, or she attempts to. It has plunged so low that she has trouble finding it at all. “I took a pill,” I say, trailing off weakly, waving my free hand about like a Victorian lady with a case of the vapors.

  Back at the firehouse I leave her with the paperwork and run toward my car. By the time I pull into the garage I am ready to crash. What to do, call 911? Take another ride in the ambulance that I just got out of? I think not.

  I call Tom Knox’s emergency number. He calls me right back. “You are highly sensitive to beta-blockers,” he says calmly. “You will feel better in the morning.” I crawl into bed. It takes four days before I feel normal. I am now totally phobic about riding in the ambulance again.

  I am back at Tom Knox’s office, back at square one. I hold out a shaking hand. “See,” I say, and my hand twitches.

  “It’s called benign essential tremor,” Tom says, seconding the opinion of the neurologist.

  “I look like a spastic,” I say. “What else can I do beside take beta-blockers?”

  “Liquor will stop the tremors, as will Valium.” He smiles. “Of course, don’t use them together, and obviously you can’t drink before going on a call.”

  I want to test the theory, so when I leave his office I head to the liquor store, where I buy a bottle of gin, a bottle of bourbon, and a bottle of scotch. I come home and unload my haul in the kitchen.

  “What’s that for?” Michael asks. He hasn’t seen me drink since he went on the wagon two years ago. I stopped drinking as a show of support.

  “Me,” I answer. “I am going to get drunk so I can be an EMT again.”

  “Huh?” Michael says. I ignore him as I pour three shots of Maker’s Mark and some ginger ale into a tall glass, add ice, and stir. I walk to my favorite chair and sit down. I am not much of a drinker. Booze was never a big deal to me; it was easy to put it aside, and I thought Michael would enjoy it if when I went to a restaurant with him I didn’t order my ubiquitous whiskey sour.

  I forgot that I like the taste of this drink and swill it down fast.

  As a science experiment I hold up my left hand and watch it shake. I watch it carefully to see if when the liquor hits my brain it stops shaking. I sit there for maybe ten minutes. I think I am seeing less of a tremor, but I am also seeing two hands where there was one. I am suddenly startlingly drunk. I get up to go to the bathroom and I lurch, I trip over Clementine, my brindle bullmastiff, who rolls out of the way. I look at her face and begin to laugh. She looks just like the Cookie Puss Carvel Cake: a big flat face with chocolate saucer eyes. I feel better than I did with the beta-blocker; in fact, I feel great in a soused, shit-faced kind of way. But there is no way I could go on an EMT call like this. I hit the speed dial and get Tom Knox’s message on the phone.

  “I had a drink,” I half belch. “I’m not so shaky as I was but I’m too drunk to talk.” I hang up.

  I sit stupefied in front of the TV watching an infomercial for George Foreman’s grilling machine. I need one, right now. I am going to call the 800 number but am too woozy to get my Visa card and bother with it. I sit there and watch George making steaks and watching the fat drain out. “So healthful,” I think. I am mesmerized by George’s shiny brown head. Eventually I get bored and stagger up to bed and sleep it off.

  18

  I need something to break the spell of the bad stuff. All I think about is John’s stroke and my own mental problems. I need something that will bring me back in sync with the joy of the firehouse and being an EMT.

  I became an EMT because it was a way to get out of my own depressed head, and think about other people’s problems, but it seems I have become immune to the antidote. I am back wallowing in my mental mess.

  Things between Michael and me are strained and getting worse. We have been married thirty-three years and are acting like we don’t know each other. In an attempt to heal what appears to be broken we start marriage therapy. We meet once a week with a woman therapist who is thoughtful and kind, yet at the end of each session I want to run screaming into oncoming traffic. Michael and I find fault with each other. We nitpick and criticize. We drag up wrongs and misdeeds from decades past. We finger-point and accuse, we become amnesiac about what we possibly could have seen in each other. It is beyond excruciating to sit in the therapist’s office each week and tell each other how we feel the other one has failed us. We are too angry to stop bitching and too much in love to leave the marriage.

  Our therapy sessions are on Wednesdays and I spend all week dreading the pain that I know will be there. It is like root canal of the heart. I love Michael; he says he loves me. But we don’t like each other at all. Our many books written together are like our children; we can’t leave the marriage because of them. We have more books together in us. I can’t write them being just friends with Michael. I have to be in love and be loved for the words to flow.

  But the words that are flowing between us are still critical and angry. “You said . . . You did . . . Why did you look at her . . . What did you mean by . . .”

  With each business trip we take for Gourmet and each column we write together, the tension grows. I cannot get through an hour of driving in the car or pulling into a motel room without tears flowing down my face. Michael drives and I cry. I cry my way through Iowa and Michigan and Texas. I cry every time I see couples our age together, I cry when I see anniversary cakes in the windows of small-town bakeries, I cry when I am in be
d at night and look at Michael’s sleeping profile and wonder if this is fini.

  When I am at home I am crying too. I am on the phone with Tom Knox daily. He is guiding me through the couples therapy. He doesn’t know what the outcome will be. I keep pushing him to tell me a “they lived happily ever after” ending, but he won’t. When I come into his office he looks serious and I go through half a box of Kleenex. My best friend, Bunny, calls three times a day to check on me. I am often in bed, sleeping. She recommends books to read and faxes me meditations on relationships. They make me cry more, but I am so glad for her friendship. I have become a pathetic case. I go to Bernice’s house and sit at her dining table and cry as I drink the coffee she makes me, I call another dear friend, Joanne, who is like a mother to me, and weep for hours, until my ear turns red from holding the phone to it.

  Michael and I have business commitments to fulfill and a mortgage to pay so we plow on as best we can. One of our commitments is a monthly column for Connecticut Magazine, in which we find stores around the state that sell unusual things, and write about them.

  We are heading this morning to Bridgeport. We have found a store that sells clerical robes to the clergy and stocks a cleaner that gets sacramental wine stains out of carpets.

  The morning has started badly already. We fight as soon as we wake up. I have not a clue what we were fighting about and I suspect Michael doesn’t either. It is just more of the blame and guilt and needs-unmet conundrum that we have unleashed on each other since we began seeing the marriage therapist. It is like a badminton game from hell, each of us walloping the frail bird across the net, whoop, as hard as we can.