Confessions of an Ambulance Girl By Jane Stern, May-June 2003

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Most Georgetown EMTs clutch before answering a call to our local AIDS hospice. I did too. When I arrived there one winter's night, I donned the full protection outfit of mask, gloves, and eye covering. The patient was an emaciated black woman with wild hair. Her room was full of balloons and teddy bears, and it was hard to tell if she was eight or 80. When a person is very ill, yet with nothing you can actively treat, it seems like a long ride to the hospital, and this one was no exception. I turned on the overhead lights, placed an oxygen mask on her, then checked the printout the hospice nurse had given me. Her name was Melba, and she was 33 years old. No previous address, no next of kin. Her whole life as presented to me was just a list of horrible symptoms and illnesses. Above the oxygen mask I could see her crusted eyes regarding me. One line on the chart caught my attention: Hobbies. How odd, I thought. Melba's hobbies were sewing and gospel singing. What did she sew? Did she have a sewing basket at one time and a place to live?

On the team Volunteers join Stern in the ambulance. Clockwise from left: Mike Cappello, Jim Brubaker, Leslie Kohl, Charlie Pfahl, Nancy Davis, and Bernice Scherb

We had been in the ambulance for about 15 minutes, and neither of us had said a word. I was a little scared—she looked near death and also very angry. I was looking for a way to connect to her. I started humming a snatch of a song by Mahalia Jackson. Melba's eyes above the oxygen mask softened. "I know I am a lousy singer," I said, and asked if she liked Shirley Caesar or the Clark sisters, two of my favorites. To my amazement I saw Melba's lips try to mouth the lyrics of a hymn. I was off-key and she was drowned out by the whoosh of the oxygen mask, but we held hands and wept as the ambulance rushed through the darkness. At the hospital I wheeled Melba's cot into the ER. The neon lights buzzed brightly overhead, the nurses, doctors, and orderlies were rushing about. Melba was all alone. I went to her curtained cubicle. I touched her shoulder blade, which jutted starkly through her nightgown. "Bye, Melba. Take care of yourself," I said, knowing she was unable to do that. She turned her face to the wall.

I walked out to the ambulance, which had been cleaned and sanitized by the driver, and climbed in the back. "Let's go," I said. There was no trace of Melba; it looked like a fresh hotel room. "Hobbies: sewing and gospel music," I repeated to myself and turned out the overhead lights as we rode toward home. I am very lucky, I kept thinking. I have a home and someone who will be happy to see me when I get back there.

Like me, most people who become EMTs do so because it makes them master of a sudden calamity, controller of chaos. It is a noble pursuit, but also an impossible thing. It took a personal crisis to make me realize that, with even the best of help, bad things can happen to good people. That we are all powerless some way, somehow.

I have a friend named John who was a father figure to me. He was used to rough physical work—at 69, he hauled hay and shod horses every day. Then one night he collapsed with a brain hemorrhage and lay on the floor for hours bleeding intercranially until someone found him and called 911. I wore my EMT jacket to the hospital to visit him the day after the stroke. It was protection, a security blanket that gave me the illusion that I had some control over this bleak situation. I am, after all, Ambulance Girl—invincible, like Wonder Woman in a flowing cape and tights.

Of all people on the planet, John is the last one who should have wound up an invalid. His left side is paralyzed, he is fed with a tube, his memory is gone. He doesn't remember that he likes Copenhagen chewing tobacco, or the rodeo, or pretty blondes with long legs. Weeks went by. I continued to visit. Someone taped a picture of his stallion above the bed. He is the only one who could ride this wild horse, and now he can't even stand up. All I could do was stroke his callused hand. As EMTs we do not know what happens to patients after we take them to the hospital. I used to find this abrupt end troubling; now it feels like a blessing.

I have been an EMT for two years. One night after a meeting, Charlie—the EMS coordinator—walked toward me. I once thought he was grouchy, but I have grown to adore him. He often comes over to talk, sometimes to ask for a recipe for his wife, to whom he has been married for 50 years.

"Young lady," he said (this is what he calls me), "we were wondering if you would take over the role of firehouse secretary." I was agog. Being secretary meant that I'd get to sit at the table with the top three officers at the monthly meetings, my name on the list of people in command not far below the chief and the president. I stammered yes and went home on a cloud. A few weeks later I was shown the secretary's file cabinet. It was filled with meeting minutes, handwritten, faded, and yellowed with age. I plunged my hand in and brought out 1949. There was an accounting of $2.81 paid to Heibeck's garage, a memo to buy two "books of chances" from the Riverside Fire Department, a note about someone's $10 donation, and a motion to buy a wheelchair for the firehouse, as well as to rent a tank of oxygen at a cost of $1 per year.

At the next monthly meeting, there was a chair for me at the front of the room. The chief nodded, the president banged his gavel, and we all stood for the Pledge of Allegiance. I placed my right hand on my heart and faced the flag. "...one nation, under God, indivisible..." I said along with the rest. Indivisible. I thought of what that word means: united, one of a group of many, not alone.

When I was a kid I thought the word was invisible, which is how I felt most of the time. I sat down at the front table and 32 people looked at me. They saw me, I was real, I was there, and I was part of something, at last.

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