Ambulance Girl (5 page)

5

By the midpoint in our EMT training we are laying hands on one another on a regular basis. We hear lectures and we take notes but we also spend a significant amount of time rolling, lifting, wrapping, splinting, and feeling each other’s bodies, looking for imaginary bullet holes, leg breaks, and flash burns.

This Thursday is a special class. Instead of being at the police station we are meeting at the town fire department, where we will practice placing each other on stretchers or stair chairs and carrying each other down flights of stairs. Like second-graders going to a museum we are lectured by Frank to be on our best behavior.
“Do not touch anything. . . . Do not talk to the firemen. . . . Do not ask them questions.”

All thirty-two of us file silently into the firehouse at 7 P.M., our hands close by our sides. We resist touching the big shiny fire engines or gawking at the men and the equipment. We are led upstairs to the great room, where the stretchers and stair chairs are laid out with their straps. The firemen are even more annoyed than the cops by our presence. They sit in a semidarkened room watching HBO on their big-screen TV and mutter as we walk by. We are plebes, probies, maggots. We are invisible and meaningless beings.

There is no ladies’ room, just a men’s room with urinals and one stall. I have to pee. I walk in and find a fireman using the urinal; he glowers at me and I run out. We are not allowed to touch anything but no one said we couldn’t look.

The decor of the upstairs of the firehouse is funny as hell. Miss Manners would have felt at home. New Canaan is a rich town with lots of old money and the firemen’s private digs have mahogany piecrust tables, well-polished old silver loving cups, charmingly thread-bare Oriental carpets, and tasteful wing chairs. It looks like the Yale Club with a few fire hats strewn around.

In this cozy collegiate atmosphere my worst nightmare is about to begin. My Achilles’ heel in this class has been my age. I am over fifty and not in great shape. I know that much of this class is about brawn, about the ability to carry people down stairs, out of the woods, up from holes they have fallen into. One of our guest instructors is Anne, a woman paramedic from Norwalk Hospital. She is solid sinew from head to toe. When I wrap my arms around her midsection to practice the Heimlich maneuver I can feel her abdominal muscles beneath her uniform shirt. Even Frank, who looks to the casual observer to be out of shape, is as strong as a bull.

The first part of the class is not too bad. We load each other onto stretchers and four of us carry the “wounded” one around. By nine at night, after two hours of stretcher work, it is time to practice the stair chair. The stair chair is a folding chair used to carry someone in a sitting position down the stairs. It is useful for people who cannot be placed in a prone position or who need to be transported down narrow stairwells where a stretcher cannot go. Frank calls out our names. We are divided into groups of five. My group are all men, huge men. The biggest of them is Sven, a twenty-three-year-old Swede who is six feet six and weighs a good 250 pounds. Sven is teased in class about his formidable bulk. Frank decides I will be the one to carry Sven down three flights of stairs. To make matters worse, the lights in the stairwell have burned out or been turned off. I can’t get a straight answer why the staircase is dark, but Frank insists that “it duplicates conditions we will encounter in real life.” Sven will be placed in the stair chair and strapped in so his arms will not be free to reach out and grab the banister. I am to carry him down accompanied by one other member of the class.

With the stair chair you can be either at the head or the foot. To be at the foot means you have to walk backward down the stairs, in this case in a darkened stairwell. What Frank does not know about me is that I have no sense of balance. In my own home, with the lights on, in broad daylight, on a familiar staircase with broad carpeted stairs, I hold on to both the wall and banister when I descend. I have always had a phobic fear of falling. I am clumsy, I lurch about. Walking down stairs with no banister is impossible for me. Now I have to do it in the dark, holding up a giant Swede.

I opt to take the head so I can walk forward. I station myself behind Sven, who is strapped to the chair. Normally jolly, he now looks grim. He thinks I will drop him and he will tumble in the stair chair three flights down. “Don’t worry,” I lie. “I’m really strong.”

Nobody, me included, wants to acknowledge that perhaps I should be trying to lift someone lighter. I refuse to whine. I bend my knees, place both hands on the hand grips of the chair. “On my count of three,” I say to my partner, who has taken the foot end of the chair. “Three!” I yell, and with all my might lift this immense person high enough into the air to clear the steps. I walk down five steps. I start to wobble.

“Don’t touch the railing,” Frank yells at me. “Keep both hands on the chair or you will drop him.”

I feel faint, I am falling, I can’t breathe. “I have to stop,” I yell, and Sven is put back down on the steps. I try to catch my breath.

Frank suggests that I take the foot part of the chair. I hate this even more, although he tells me it is a little lighter to carry the foot of the chair. It means I have to walk backward down the stairs. I am scared. Frank comes behind me and grabs the waist of my jeans to help guide me down. I am too polite to tell him he also has my undies and that he is giving me a major wedgie. He is going to steady me as I walk down the stairs; he will tell me when to step off.

“Lift” he says, and I bend over, my underpants tight in the crack of my ass. “Step,” Frank says. I do not move. Sven feels even heavier holding him this way.
“Step!”
Frank yells at me. “Don’t let him just hang in the air.” Frank is pulling me down the darkened stairs by my underpants. Sven is swaying left and right. He knows he is going to be dropped. He frees a long arm out from the restraining straps and grabs the banister. I drop my end of the chair. Frank is still holding on to my pants. I hear a rip. Sven crashes down, groaning as he hits the concrete stairs. The four guys in my group all look away, embarrassed. “FAIL!” Frank yells. “Stern, see me after class.”

I am bathed in sweat. My heart pounds, I can’t breathe. I run past the guys on the stairs and look for a safe place to collapse. There is a couch in the darkened TV room where the firemen are congregated. I fall on the couch and they pretend not to notice me. I pull at my underpants; I try to breathe; I can’t stop sweating. I start to cry. I think I am having a heart attack. What a way to go, surrounded by EMTs. I have crawled away into a dark corner like a dog to die. I can’t call 911 because they are already here. I have failed, so why would they save me? Slowly I start to come around. I stagger to my feet and sneak out the side door and drive home. When I get there Michael is asleep. I don’t wake him up. I stay up until 3 A.M. taking my pulse and blood pressure repeatedly. I press my carotid artery hard just as Frank warned me not to do.

That is it, it is all over. FAIL! The word rings in my ears. Move over and make room for the young and the strong, for women with six-pack abs, for giant Nordic gods like Sven. I can’t even walk down a fucking flight of stairs without holding on. What good am I? What a waste of time this whole thing is.

The next day I call Melanie Barnard, a friend who is an EMT in New Canaan. She is small-framed and not all that young. I tell her my trauma with Sven. “Big deal,” she says. “That’s what the cops and firemen are for—to help you lift people.” I am cheered: big, young, strong men, at my command. Suddenly I feel better.

At our next class I know I have to face Frank. Not only was I unable to carry Sven but I did not “see him after class” as I was told. Before class begins I summon up the courage to confront Frank with my FAIL. It doesn’t seem to be as make or break as I thought it was. He looks at me somewhat sympathetically and says, “Do some weight training.” It is not the end of the world. I buy a treadmill and do an hour a day on it while I watch
Trauma Center
on the Learning Channel to toughen me up to the gore factor.

Pretty soon my postclass routine of going home, having a bagel, and watching old movies on TV has changed. I am now watching the Tape. The Tape costs $49.00 and is ordered through the mail from a medical book publishing company. The title is blunt:
Pass
EMT-B.
We are now halfway through the class, we have about eighty hours of classroom work behind us and a dozen tests.

At the beginning of the last class Frank has brought up the subject of the national boards. We will have to pass this grueling two-day exam to become EMTs. The boards are given after all classroom work is done, after we have interned at a local hospital ER, and after we have passed Frank’s finals. We then drive an hour and a half away to a vocational school in the boondocks of central Connecticut, where we are given the two-day exam. Frank tells us the odds of us passing it are 50/50. He tells us that many of the people we will see there will have already failed the test once or twice and are trying yet again. He tells us that the trick to passing is to memorize every word he has said and every word in our textbooks and then to get a copy of the
Pass EMT-B
tape and learn it by heart.

I order it on
Amazon.com
the minute I get home from class. I pay extra for overnight shipping although the test is still months away. Dot, who is extremely thrifty, immediately starts asking me who we can borrow a copy of the tape from. Deceitfully I do not tell her I have a copy. I want it all for myself. At least for now.

On my home treadmill, I put the tape in the video machine hooked up to the TV in front of the treadmill.
Pass
EMT-B
is a six-part play, the star of which is a tidy young woman with a Dorothy Hamill haircut who progresses through all six practical scenarios of the national boards.

Needless to say, she does everything perfectly. She is to be our role model if we want to pass. I hate her. I hate her robotic delivery and the way she looks so humorless. I hate how her polyester uniform pants do not make her ass look fat. I hate that I have to act just like her in order to pass the test. I watch the tape twice a day every day. I watch her hook semiautomatic defibrillators up to real people pretending to be patients. Frank tells us that our patients will be National Guard recruits, and that we are not to talk to them before, during, or after the test. To do so is an automatic fail, Frank says.

When I am not watching the tape I am sitting in class. Tonight’s class is about head injuries, and I am thinking about the fact that my father had a steel plate in his skull and how it made him go into uncontrollable rages. I don’t know much about how he was injured so badly, except some hastily explained story about how he was playing near the trolley tracks in Harlem when he was eight years old.

As I child I never questioned the story or wanted to know more. My father was a very private man, and plagued by mental problems. When we sat together at Saturday-afternoon matinees at the Loews theater on East Eighty-sixth Street he clicked his tongue and hummed and cracked his knuckles and made weird ticlike facial movements. I could see the unevenness of his skull illuminated by the movie screen; his forehead caved in slightly and then came sharply out, where the plate must have been. For years I dreamed about Frankenstein’s monster chasing me. I especially hated the big ragged stitches on his head. I always went to my mother for comfort after a bad dream, never my father.

My father could be charming but was unable to hold a job. His unpredictable rages would sever ties as soon as he blasted his boss wherever he was working. For a few years he stayed home, painted flowers and sailboats on canvas as a hobby, and waxed and rewaxed the family car. My mother supported the family selling handbags at a posh shop on Madison Avenue and then became a dental hygienist. When I was eight my mother packed some suitcases and ran away with me when my father was out walking our dog. We moved into a brownstone apartment thirty blocks uptown from where we had lived as a family. That summer my mother left me with our housekeeper and took a Greyhound bus to Juárez, Mexico, and got a divorce against my father’s wishes. My father never forgave her, and as revenge he threatened to kill us both.

This is when my phobias started. I was afraid to leave the house—with good reason, I realize now. My father never actually attempted the murder, but he sat for hours at a time under the window of the brownstone where my mother and I lived. I could see him peering up at the window with binoculars. I kept waiting for the sound of heavy monsterlike footsteps on the stairs. Through the walls I could hear his hard breath.

I am finding myself growing more and more anxious as Frank lectures to us and shows us pictures of what a skull looks like after it has been whacked with a baseball bat and a steel pipe. Frank calls the brain the Big Cheese, his version of Harry’s Big Kahuna nervous system. We are told not to be impressed by the massive bleeding that comes from skull lacerations, but to pay attention to assessing any visible bone fragments of the skull.

Frank teaches us how to use the Glasgow Coma Scale to gauge a person’s level of awareness. He does not explain why it is called the Glasgow scale. I imagine unconscious Scottish people lying motionless on the cobblestone streets.

Frank is showing a picture of someone with dark circles under the eyes—the distinctive raccoon eyes of a neurological injury. The picture looks like me when I wake up in the morning after forgetting to take off my eye makeup. “The patient will present with the possibility of blurred vision, double vision, tunnel vision, ringing in ears, dizziness, loss of equilibrium, nausea, feeling that their hands are burning.” I feel a menopausal hot flash starting, I am burning up. Dot is busy taking notes. I suddenly feel very cold and lonely.