Photographs by Eli Reed
|
Confessions of an Ambulance Girl
By Jane Stern, May-June 2003
She was a raging hypochondriac who hated to be around sick people. Then she became an EMT—and it changed her life
|
If you live in Georgetown, Connecticut, and press 911, the police radio dispatcher will beep me on my pager. I will get on the two-way radio in my car and say, "G-65 EMT responding," and drag myself, my portable oxygen tank, my defibrillator, and a giant bag of medical supplies into the homes of sick strangers. As a volunteer emergency medical technician (EMT), I wait for my call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It pulls me out of deep sleep, out of showers, away from dinner, from my favorite TV shows, and from long, loving embraces. I could pretend I didn't hear the beeps, but I don't. What I have learned by becoming an EMT is a precious lesson: that in helping others, I helped myself to get well.
For years I had passed the Georgetown Volunteer Fire Company on the way to the post office or the bank. Occasionally, I would see fire trucks lined up or the ambulance zooming out of its parking bay. I never paid much attention; it was just part of the local landscape. Outside was placed the kind of sign that you stick magnetic letters on, like what a deli or a church has. The sign was always there. It said, "Vols. Wanted...FIRE EMS." Sometimes, after a strong wind, it read, "Vo s Want d." It, too, was just part of the scenery.
I knew I was not going to be a firefighter. But something about the EMS (Emergency Medical Service) sign stuck. It pointed me to everything cowardly I knew about myself—my fear of death and disease, my claustrophobia about being in moving vehicles that I was not driving. I was so suggestible about illness that I never watched hospital shows like ER. But the sign wouldn't leave my mind.
Looking back, doing something against the way I defined myself should not have seemed so surprising. I was having a midlife "event," if not a full-blown crisis. I was miserable. I had spent my whole life paralyzed by fears. Fearfulness and general nutty behavior were a family legacy. My grandmother was so agoraphobic she did not leave her house for 30 years. My father had a dozen tics and suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as the consequences of having a steel plate surgically implanted in his skull from a horrendous head trauma that he suffered as a child. He flew into fits and rages at the slightest provocation.
Just about everyone in my family was odd. Despite being successful professionals, my aunts, uncles, and cousins wouldn't fly, wouldn't take boats, wouldn't use public phones, and wouldn't eat in restaurants for fear of being poisoned. My most notorious relative (about whom I know very little) was apparently one of the original celebrity stalkers. Even though it was mentioned only in hushed tones when I was a kid, it was clear that a second cousin on my mother's side lived out his days at a hospital for the insane after being caught in a White House bedroom looking for Harry Truman's daughter while wearing a woman's mink coat.
At age 52 my own longtime teetering toward depression had caught up with me. I spent my days walking around the house in a baggy blue bathrobe. It was hard to find the energy to get dressed, and quite frankly, there was no pressing need. As a writer, I worked at home. Days could go by when I would not see anyone but my husband, Michael. I could talk on the phone, but people could not see what I looked like. We had no kids to attend to. The dog didn't care what I was wearing. It was hard to find the incentive to run a comb through my hair, to brush my teeth. The bed went unmade. I spent hours sitting in my favorite recliner watching TV. My pants grew tight, and I didn't care.
I knew I needed to see a shrink. I got a recommendation from a friend and made an appointment. In one of our first sessions, he tried to have me recall if there was one moment, even a fraction of a second in the last year, when I came out of my self-focused despair and didn't feel as if the whole world was collapsing. Yes, there was. On a short flight from Minneapolis to Chicago, the plane was delayed on the runway for hours. Plane delays were at the top of my list of frightening things. I was totally panicked, looking at my watch every 30 seconds, hyperventilating and having palpitations.
Near me, a high school boy onboard took ill. He hadn't eaten, and complained about feeling lightheaded and dizzy. In my handbag I had a candy bar. I asked him if he would like it. In about 10 minutes his cheeks were pink, and he was laughing with his friends. During this short time focused on someone else, I was fine.
After about two months of talk therapy and Prozac, I did something that I never imagined I would do. I stopped at the Georgetown firehouse to ask about becoming an EMT. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and I was dressed in one of my usual outfits—to kill, not to cure. I wore a long, flowing three-tiered silk skirt, a bright red Chinese silk jacket, blue custom-made cowboy boots with my initials in yellow, and long silver-and-turquoise earrings.
Charlie Pfahl, the EMS coordinator, was in charge of accepting applications. He was hard-nosed and gruff and had been at the firehouse longer than any other active member. 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 I was too old, too fat, and too fancy for the job. His dismissal had a strange effect. I went home and cried and pouted and fumed and raged about the unfairness of everyone and everything. I called my psychiatrist and cried to him, and then I got pissed off and decided that nothing in the world could stop me from becoming an EMT.
|
