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Confessions of an Ambulance Girl
By Jane Stern, May-June 2003
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I started my EMT training course on a freezing day in the lecture room of the New Canaan police station. The class met three times a week. Almost immediately I started having every symptom of every disease the instructor mentioned. Now I had fancy words for what was wrong with me. I was no longer sweaty. I was diaphoretic. My hand wandered constantly to my neck to check my carotid artery to see if my pulse was thready or bounding. I was no longer breathing rapidly but was suffering from tachypnea. I had all the symptoms of a heart attack, a stroke, an aneurysm. I felt impending doom, my heart raced, my hands tingled, I couldn't feel the right side of my face.
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On the job
Stern and paramedic Marc Sacco transport a patient.
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A car was not fun to drive anymore. It was a metal cage waiting to kill me in a dozen ways I had never thought about. I could get trapped inside underwater. The rescue personnel would not be able to free me, thanks to Ralph Nader, a man I once admired but who now was clearly Satan, having been responsible for cars with doors that do not fly open in a crash and come with safety glass that can't be shattered easily to free the victim. Whenever Nader's name was mentioned, the paramedics and firefighters could hardly restrain their sneers.
Sometimes I felt too stupid for the class. I could not remember how many liters of oxygen were in an M-sized O2 tank. Other times I thought the class was too stupid for me. We were lectured on the following: 1) Do not try to replace someone's organs if they are hanging from the body. 2) Do not give CPR to a severed head. 3) Do not try to revive someone who is in a state of advanced decomposition. 4) If you have a patient whose leg or arm is partially amputated, do not pull it off to make things "neat." (I saw myself giving chest compressions to an accident victim's body, and then running 20 feet down the highway to blow air into the mouth of the severed head.) I completed the class and a short internship at the local hospital, then took the EMT National Boards. When I heard I passed, I was beside myself with glee. I sewed EMT patches on everything I owned and paraded all around town.
I was now a full member of the Georgetown Fire Department. At the firehouse I met the people I would work with on the ambulance and at fires. I was issued a used blue gabardine jacket with a brown corduroy collar that said "GEORGETOWN EMS" across the back in two-inch reflective letters. On the job I didn't look like much. By the time I got the jacket, its previous owner had lost the thermal liner, and so it was as limp as a Kleenex from years of wear. In winter the wind whips through it; in summer it sags from humidity.
I was also given a pager and a police radio. Then I went home and waited for it to go off—which it did at 2 a.m. The first thing I did after jumping into my blue jumpsuit was to give another EMT's number over the radio and then babble a long apology. It is the worst breach of police-radio etiquette to say one word more than you absolutely must. After I screwed up my first radio transmission, I realized I was out of the driveway, blue lights flashing, speeding down the road, and I had no idea where I was going. I was told to go straight to an address and meet the ambulance there. I have lived in this town for more than 20 years and have not once noticed the name of any street other than the one I live on. Like most people who live in a fairly rural place, I knew the roads but not their official names. (I do now.)
At first everything seemed odd. Even my marriage was different. Michael protested the pager, which seemed to always go off at 2 a.m., by fuming out loud and then moving into the guest room with a load of bedding. Just as I thought my EMT activities were endangering our marriage, I heard from friends that all Michael did was brag about me.
Slowly I was drawn into just the kind of intense drama I had previously dreaded. I had to cut the clothing off a man who'd had a car accident. I transported a little boy to the hospital who had a fever so high he was having seizures. A woman had gone crazy and thought her husband was trying to kill their children. Another person ingested a huge, hideous mushroom as a health-food cure and passed out. To my amazement I found I knew what to do. My hand automatically reached for the right cervical collar, the appropriate-size oral airway. The oxygen and suction machines obeyed my commands. What I hadn't counted on was the emotional toll. Your memories don't stop when the run form is completed.
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