Ambulance Girl (2 page)

“I can’t do this,” I whispered to Michael. I could see the look of frustration on his face. “I’m sorry,” I said, wishing I could give him money or a gift to make up for my shortcomings as a wife and partner.

“I can’t do this,” I said to Sally, who was blessedly cool about it.

“Yeah, you said you would rather ride in the car with me,” she said.

I felt like a big baby. I thought about all the field trips in grade school that I missed because I was afraid to be on a bus, or away from home. My phobias and separation anxieties went way back to my childhood. “I’ll talk to the listeners when we get to the restaurant,” I said, trying to make it better. I felt like an asshole as I got in the front seat of her car.

At the end of a long day, the bus trip was over. Michael had been charming enough for both of us; our listeners seemed happy. They liked the NPR tote bags that were given to them and they had liked the restaurant we had traveled so many miles to eat at.

I was glad, but I was still complaining. “I don’t know why we couldn’t have just eaten somewhere in Minneapolis,” I said to Michael as we sat waiting for the plane. “There are plenty of great places to eat there.”

Michael looked at me. I could tell he was tired and pissed off. “They live in Minneapolis. The point was to go on an adventure, go somewhere new,” he said.

I got defensive. “I think it is stupid. There are many good places to eat in town that we wouldn’t have to take a bus to.” Michael chose not to answer. He took out his laptop computer and started to work, staring at the small screen so he could block me out.

We were not going home. We were headed for Chicago, a fifty-five-minute flight from Minneapolis. We had been asked to give a lecture the next day at a Chicago-based think tank. They wanted to know what we had observed about other people’s eating habits: what they ate, what aisles they shopped in the supermarket, what food magazines appealed to what demographics. They were putting us up at the Four Seasons in a lavish suite and paying us well. It was exciting and I was looking forward to it.

With the long bus ride behind me, I never imagined that the true nightmare was just about to begin. We boarded the plane and taxied away from the gate. Then a strange thing happened. We headed off the main runway onto a smaller one, then taxied all the way to the farthest outskirts of the airport. There the plane stopped and shut off its engines.

My fear of flying had little to do with crashing, and everything to do with claustrophobia. To me a plane was a sealed metal tube—an MRI machine with wings. If it was moving in the direction it was supposed to be going, I was all right; but any delay caused my anxiety level to hit 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. It was dusk and I could see through the dirty little windows of the plane that we were not even near the airport anymore. The fact that the engines were turned off was a dire sign. I held my breath. I tried not to hyperventilate. I grabbed Michael’s hand; mine was cold as ice and sweaty at the same time. Michael gave me
the look
—the look that comes from thirty years of living with someone who has raging anxiety. It is a look that is both sympathetic and reassuring. It is one of the many reasons to love Michael.

Finally the pilot clicked on the intercom. “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” he droned in that familiar flat, emotionless way (are they taught to talk that way at pilot school?) “seems like we are going to sit here for a little while. O’Hare seems to be having some traffic control problems. I will let you know when we are taking off.”

We sat on the runway for six hours. During this time my body pumped so much adrenaline that I thought I was having a heart attack every five minutes. Michael said every soothing thing he could think of. After three hours into the delay I stretched out limply over his lap and let him stroke my head. “When are we going to move?” I whined at Michael as if he were a fortune-telling genie who held the secret answer. I got up and paced the aisles. I tried to breathe deeply, I tried not to breathe. I felt my temples throbbing and was convinced I was having a stroke.

I reached into my purse and lapped up the powdered remains of a decade-old Valium that I had been carting around for just such an occasion. The container was so old that the doctor’s name had worn off. The flight attendants were not pleasant; obviously they were pissed off too. The pilot stopped giving us updates after the first two hours. The sun had set and I could see nothing out the plane’s windows, no lights, nothing.

The air was stale, the lavatory toilet clogged after the second hour, there was no food on the plane since it was only supposed to be an hourlong flight.

The Valium was useless. Michael did the best he could. He opened his wallet and showed me pictures of our pets. He tried to talk about what we would eat in Chicago when we landed. Nothing could get my attention from the fact that the plane was not moving. I died the thousand deaths of a coward before the plane finally took off.

By the time we arrived at the hotel my nervous system was so overtaxed that I propped myself up on the reception desk like a drunk on a lamppost. Once in our room I dived under the bedcovers and fell into a dreamless sleep.

Somehow I got through the presentation the next day, but on the return flight home our plane was again delayed two hours. I had run out of adrenaline. My body felt numb, and I felt disconnected and unreal. When I got home I called a psychiatrist that a friend had recommended. He was supposed to be good.

Psychiatry was not new to me. It was the family business. My uncles were psychoanalysts, even though, despite being members of distinguished university faculties and respected Freudian institutes, they were too phobic to fly on planes. They were very old school about the treatment of phobias, which meant they believed in talking about “underlying issues.” My favorite uncle was at Yale Medical School and I remember how proud he was to have patients who had been with him for decades.

My uncle would take an ocean liner to Europe when he had to go to a psychiatric convention abroad, and when his own father was on his deathbed in Los Angeles, he and my mother took a five-day train trip across the country rather then set foot on a plane. My grandfather died two days before they arrived.

When Michael and I were students in graduate school, my uncle, who was having his office redecorated, gave us his well-worn leather analyst’s couch. I imagined that to press on it would let lose a stream of cries and wails. In bed at night sometimes I fantasized the living room filling with floating words, years of why his patients were miserable and stuck in their fears and fantasies. The words circled the ceiling, not going anywhere.

As comfortable as I was about seeing a shrink, I was also skeptical. Blah, blah, blah, and big monthly bills was what I imagined. It seemed like a dead-end road to me.

But nonetheless I appeared for my first session with the new psychiatrist and found that I liked him even before I saw him. I was comforted by the delicate orchid that he had growing in the waiting room, the collection of wooden walking sticks, and artwork that was many levels above the usual museum posters and such that shrinks use to decorate their waiting rooms. He greeted me and ushered me into his office. I had already told him on the phone about my six hours on the runway. With a sympathetic shake of his blond hair, he began the session by saying, “What a fucking nightmare.”

Ahh, at last: a shrink I could relate to, who expressed my sentiments perfectly. Maybe he could pull me out of the muck of depression and make it seem safe to venture out in the world again. Convince me, I thought, as I looked around his office, that the world is not just waiting to trap me in buses, airplanes, and in my own black stupor in front of the TV set.

I think that good psychotherapy is like love or friendship. So much of it is indefinable chemistry between two people. I had seen three shrinks before and had not felt any improvement. When I was a student at Yale my father died and my fear of buses and airplanes expanded to include elevators and subways. Taking a bus was something my therapist and I had talked about in depth. One day en route to a session, my car broke down in New Haven. I did a marathon run to his office, arriving only ten minutes late. “Why didn’t you take a bus?” he asked me blankly. I felt like I had been talking to a wall for a year.

My new shrink’s name was Tom Knox. The fact that I could not afford his rates did nothing to sour me on wanting to see him. I knew I belonged on that couch facing him in his black leather chair. I liked everything about him, from the bottoms of his shoes that faced me as he put them up on the ottoman in front of his chair to the Bose radio in his waiting room.

In our first sessions together he tried to have me recall if there was one moment, even a fraction of a second, in the endless adrenaline bath of panic I had taken on that plane, when I didn’t feel like the whole world was collapsing around me.

Yes, there was. At one point about three hours into the ordeal, a high school kid who was on the first leg of a charter flight to Switzerland with his classmates took ill. He hadn’t eaten all day and was feeling dizzy.

“There is nothing to eat on this plane,” the flight attendant told him curtly, and he looked pale and frightened.

I had a candy bar in my handbag. I pulled it out and walked to the seat where he sat with a few classmates huddled around him trying to give him moral support. I asked him if he would like the candy bar, suggesting it might make him feel more energized. He looked uncomfortable but he took it. He ate it, and in about ten minutes his cheeks were pink and he was laughing with his friends.

The crisis over, I began fretting again about myself, about being trapped in the plane, but that few minutes of being involved in helping someone else worked like the Valium should have, but didn’t.

I began seeing Tom Knox once a week. I checked his credentials, all good: Johns Hopkins for medical school, New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center for internship and residency. He believed in talking, but he also believed in drugs. He put me on an antidepressant and I felt significantly better almost at once. He gave me a new fresh supply of Valium and told me to take it when I needed it, that carrying it around in my handbag for a decade was not going to help get me through my fears. I trusted him. I trusted his gray sweater vest and the good smell of the leather chairs inside his office. Maybe there was hope for me after all.

3

“I think I want to be an EMT,” I told Tom during a session. I was amazed that he did not laugh at me. He smiled and said it sounded interesting. At this point he knew me well enough to know that my family history was not only awash with nutcases, but also littered with the sick and dead, and that the mere mention of illness caused my heart to race and my temples to throb.

By the time I was twenty-five, both my parents had died from cancer. My favorite uncle, the shrink at Yale, followed suit soon after, as did his twenty-nine-year-old daughter, who died from breast cancer. My aunt died of Alzheimer’s, my other cousin died at twenty-three in a car wreck. Even my dog died during that grim period. It had all left me with a bad case of hypochondria. Every twinge was a brain tumor, MS, or a stroke. Something awful was always about to happen to me.

I had been seeing Tom Knox for about two months when I stopped, after a shrink session, at the Georgetown firehouse to talk to someone about becoming an EMT. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision and I was dressed to kill, not to cure. I wore a long, flowing, three-tiered silk skirt and a bright red Chinese silk jacket with a mandarin collar, blue custom-made cowboy boots with my initials on them in yellow, and long silver and turquoise earrings. Since the antidepressants had kicked in I was again getting dressed and using makeup. I thought I looked pretty good.

The man in charge of accepting EMT applications was in his seventies, hard-nosed and gruff. His name was Charlie. He looked at me and said, “Lady, I don’t think this is for you,” then went into a long soliloquy about vomit.

Vomit was his personal nemesis, the world’s worst and most abhorrent thing. He looked at my silk outfit. “They’ll vomit all over you,” he said, trying to scare me. He did. I hated vomit too. In fact, vomit was high on my scale of things that made me panic. I was so afraid of vomiting myself that it never occurred to me that I might be the target of someone else’s spew.

Then came a not very subtle remark about my age (old) and my weight (heavy). The bottom line, as he saw it, was that I was too old, too fat, and too fancy for the job.

His dismissal of me had a strange effect. I went home and cried and pouted and fumed, and raged about the unfairness of everyone and everything. I called Tom Knox and cried to him, and then I got pissed off and decided that nothing in the world could stop me from becoming an EMT.

Nothing except perhaps my own formidable demons.

Top of the demon list was my lifelong claustrophobia. I woke up in a cold sweat at 2 A.M. trying to recall what an ambulance looked like. I remembered that they seemed to have two parts, the driver’s compartment and the “room” part where the sick person was put. Were there windows in the back? Did the doors open from the inside? Was there a way to get from the back part to the driver’s part if you had to? Or were you trapped in the back end with the sick, possibly vomiting person, locked in and unable to escape?

I paced the bedroom, and at 8 A.M. I called the firehouse and again spoke to Charlie. “Can I come and look at the ambulance?” I asked.

There was a long pause. I don’t think he wanted to see me again but he said I could look at it if I wanted.

Later that day I went back to the firehouse. I didn’t dare tell him about my claustrophobia or fear of moving vehicles, certainly wouldn’t tell him I was afraid of sick people. This time I wore jeans and a T-shirt. I opened the doors of the back of “the bus,” as it was referred to, and crawled in. I didn’t like what I saw one bit. It was like a shrunken emergency room, oxygen masks and suction tubes and bandages and splints and other vile icons of death and dying were crammed into a small space.

A small passage space allowed contact with the front compartment and the doors could be opened from the inside, and the little windows opened to let in fresh air. It was not a totally sealed space, but it still gave me the creeps.

I looked at Charlie’s face. He was going through the motions, but obviously couldn’t wait for me to leave.

“What is it you wanted to look at exactly?” he asked.

“Nothing really, I just have never been inside an ambulance,” I said and tried to imagine if I could squeeze myself through the space from the back to the front if I was freaking out in the back.

“Thanks . . . I think I would really like to become an EMT.”

I don’t know if he or I looked more shocked when I said those words. We both stared at each other mutely.

He took me upstairs, where I filled out paperwork that would enroll me for the class that would begin in a month.

As much as I hated the ambulance, I instantly loved the firehouse. It looked perfectly comfortable in the most manly, blue-collar way. The main room had a big-screen TV turned to a NASCAR race, comfortable couches, a bar area with open boxes of beef jerky sticks, a soda machine that delivered cans of Pepsi for free, a big pool table with a Budweiser sign over it, a pinball game from the 1950s, and a wooden shuffleboard table game called Horseshoe that looked like it was from the 1930s.

It was GI-barracks neat. Old fire helmets were in a display case and patches from other friendly fire departments were stapled to a burlap-covered board. I wanted to sit on the big couches and eat beef jerky with the guys.

I signed the paperwork and went home.

I walked in the door that leads from the garage to the kitchen to find Michael boiling a pot of water for spaghetti.

“Hi,” he said. “Where were you?”

“At the Georgetown firehouse,” I said as I watched him slide his favorite imported pasta into the water. “Guess what?” I said. “I’m going to be an EMT.”

Michael stirred the pasta in the pot and got a bemused look on his face, as if I had told him that I figured out Santa Claus really existed. I had seen this look before. I had seen it when I came home declaring that I was going to take up the bagpipes, and I had seen it when I said I was going to sign up for boxing lessons at a raunchy gym in nearby Danbury. It was the look of disbelief and of humoring me along.

“Cool,” he replied. “When do you start?”

I felt myself flush with annoyance. He thought I was just spinning my wheels.

“I’m not kidding,” I insisted.

“Did I say you were?” he said back. “What do you do as an EMT?” he asked.

“You pull dying people from car wrecks and that kind of thing,” I muttered.

Michael raised an eye at me. “That’s what you want to do?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” I said, feeling weak in the knees.

What Michael didn’t know was that I had started the process of becoming an emergency medic almost half a century before. I was the child who was always playing doctor. I even had a specialty: head transplants. The transplants were an innovative technique that involved my twin teddy bears, George and Soft Baby, and a pair of sharp scissors. The procedure was to cut their heads off at the neck and then switch them. George got Soft Baby’s head and vice versa. It was an elaborate and time-consuming operation. First the severed heads were placed on a clean towel, then a threaded needle from my mother’s sewing box was sterilized with Arpège perfume. Two lengths of brocade ribbon bought from the notions department at Bloomingdale’s were cut to size and the bear’s heads were laboriously sutured to each other’s bodies using the ribbon at the new neckline. I had perfected the operation after doing it at least a dozen times, so it was a shame when one day I got careless and accidentally knocked George’s severed head off the windowsill, and it lay in the courtyard of the fancy building on Fifth Avenue that abutted the townhouse in which I lived with my parents. No matter how I cried and pleaded, the doorman would not leave his post and retrieve my bear’s head from the courtyard. Formidable in his large great coat and cap, he sent me packing. He did not understand this was a medical emergency . . . a 911 call.

I started my real EMT training course on a freezing winter’s day in the lecture room of the New Canaan police station. The cops behind the bulletproof window glowered as I entered. There were no kind looks given to me or the other forty people in the class who followed me in. We may not have been perps but we were interlopers in the cops’ sanctuary. Over the microphone and through the bulletproof glass we were told not to loiter in the lobby, not to talk to the police, not to park in the nearby spaces in the parking lot reserved for police cars . . . to generally get lost, sit down, and shut up.

I immediately got so nervous I lost one of my favorite earrings, dropped my eyeglasses and bent the frames, and spilled the contents of my purse on the floor. None of the students made eye contact with each other. Everyone looked grim and nervous. The majority of the class were young men, firefighters or police trainees looking for their EMT certification.

The class ran three hours. We were given the textbooks. I opened mine at random and saw a large color photo of a man with half his head missing and his brain pouring out like gray pudding. I turned the page. There was a photo of a partial amputation of a limb, the jagged white bone protruding from what looked like a steamship round of beef. I turned it again and there was someone with third-degree burns on his penis, his skin hanging like scarlet ribbons down his leg. I felt the latte I had brought to class from the nearby Starbuck’s roaring in the wrong direction up my gullet. Old, fat, and singleearringed, I prayed to not puke all over myself the first day. I tried to fade into the crowd.

Our instructor was a paramedic named Frank Posca. I wanted Frank to like me but he made it clear he was not interested in friendship from anyone in the class. He was a tattooed ex-military man, a veteran of the streets of Bridgeport, where from the back of the ambulance he worked on a regular basis with crack addicts and glue sniffers and failed suicides. Frank was short and wide, a cinder block of a man with a closely barbered head and a tiny gold earring.

When I look now at the big white plastic loose-leaf notebook I carried to the class over the long months ahead, I see how neat and tidy my writing was in those first few classes. How I copied down in a firm black pen such nuggets of wisdom as “Professional attributes of an EMT are a neat clean appearance, current knowledge and skills, attention to patient care.” I wondered if someone with their brain hanging out of their head would notice my “neat clean appearance” or my missing earring and bent eyeglasses.

Printed and in large letters in my notebook were Frank’s words of warning that first day: “EMT is the most stressful job of all!” And below that, a list of the warning signs of stress, which included “anxiety, guilt, indecisiveness, isolation, fear of separation and being ignored.” Since I already had all these symptoms before I set foot in the class, I wondered how I would know when the job was getting to me.

EMT training is like boot camp. This was a new way of learning to me. I was a product of exclusive Ivy League schools and progressive preps. My teachers were there to nurture me, to gently water the seed of my talents and coax it to the sunlight. The first day of class Frank had us all bellowing in unison the watchwords for becoming an EMT: “BSI . . . I’m number one!” we screamed.

BSI means Body Substance Isolation, i.e., protective gloves and, if necessary, a mask and eye protection and perhaps full fireman’s turnout gear complete with self-contained breathing apparatus. If you are an EMT you do not go into a scene and you do not even think of touching patients without at least a barrier of rubber between you and them.

“I’m number one” means that you are important to yourself and to the rescue unit. If you arrive at the scene of an emergency and someone is pointing a gun at you, the house is burning down, toxic fumes are clouding the air, or a psychotic is telling you the Martians have ordered him to kill you now, you do not attempt to be a hero. You run for cover and get help. That is what being number one is all about.

When I left the first class I was so wrung out that my hands shook. I could hardly unlock my car door. As I drove home, it started to snow. I felt the car skid as I made the turns on the back roads. What if I had an accident and had to call 911? Could I tell them I was sort of one of them?

I got home shortly before midnight. It was late and Michael had gone to bed. I made myself a toasted bagel with cream cheese, sat downstairs in the den, and flipped the channel of the TV to an old Bette Davis movie. I thought of the gruesome pictures in the textbook and felt queasy again. I pushed the bagel aside, walked upstairs, and crawled into bed next to Michael, basking in his warmth. Safe for now.

The class met three times a week. Being back in a classroom flooded me with memories of childhood. I was now significantly bigger than the last time I sat at a school desk, and I now found the chair with the writing board that swung around under my right arm constrictive. I also had a lot more “stuff” than I did as a kid—a purse, a coffee mug—and I was minus a locker or cubbyhole in which to stash it.

I arrived chronically early to the class, scouted out my favorite chair on the far left of the front row, attractive to me because it was close to a window ledge where I could rest my stainless steel tankard of coffee, my handbag, and my textbooks.

Buying the notebook and pens for the class was a rush of nostalgia. I had not handled three-ring lined notebook paper in years. I bought a plastic pouch to hold pens and pencils, colorful plastic dividers to segregate one class neatly from another. I arrived freshly scrubbed, bright-eyed, and eager. I smiled at everyone who came in. Few returned my glance.

I was not the oldest person in the class. There were two people my senior. One was a small-boned woman, thin and jittery. The other was a man with a gray woolly head and thick glasses. My first thought when I looked at them was, They don’t belong here. They were too old, too dilapidated. I smelled trouble; they would have special needs, be slow, be irritating. Ungenerous in my assessment, I wanted them out. I dreaded that anyone might think I was like them. Sure, I was more than thirty years older than most of my classmates, but it was obvious these people were really old and didn’t belong here.