Ambulance Girl
Table of Contents
TO MICHAEL STERN FOR SO MANY YEARS
OF LOVE AND INSPIRATION
AND FOR THOMAS E. KNOX, M.D., WHO SHOWED ME
THE WAY OUT OF THE DARKNESS
acknowledgments
Although this book has only my name on it, I need to acknowledge my husband, Michael Stern, for the constant support and endless help he provided me. I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my agent, attorney, and longtime friend, Michael I. Rudell, for believing in
Ambulance Girl
and finding a good home for it. That happy place was with my editor, Annik La Farge at Crown Publishers, who guided my hand and heart to get the story right. Dorianne Steele at Crown was a pleasure to work with and made the publishing process a delight. I would also like to thank Neil J. Rosini at Franklin, Weinrib, Rudell & Vassallo for his insightful advice, as well as Bill Adams at Crown, who also read the manuscript with a keen eye. Special thanks to Allison J. Bloom, my attorney in Connecticut, who as a veteran EMT gave me not only exceptional legal advice but saved me from embarrassment with any technical writerly blunders. This book could not have been completed without hand-holding by my dear friends Bunny Kyle and Joanne Driscoll, who saw me through the hard parts. Thank you one and all.
1
I am G-65.
That is the number I was given when I became an Emergency Medical Technician at the volunteer fire company in Georgetown, Connecticut. I live in Georgetown, a rural, blue-collar town whose main attraction is a sprawling defunct wire mill with broken windows.
If you live in Georgetown and press 911, the dispatcher will tone me out. I will get on the two-way police radio in my car and say, “G-65 EMT responding.”
I have another name, too:
Ambulance Girl
. . . as in, “Honey, the ambulance girl is here.” I hear this as I drag myself, my portable oxygen tank, my defibrillator, and a giant bag of medical supplies into the homes of sick strangers.
I wait for my tone twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It comes over any of my three police radios: upstairs and downstairs at home, and in my car. My tone goes like this: two long beeps (one higher than the other), followed by five short beeps. It pulls me out of deep sleep, out of showers, away from the dinner table, from my favorite TV shows, away from arguing with my husband, away from phone calls telling me I owe money to the department store, and away from long, slow, loving embraces. I could pretend I didn’t hear the tone but I don’t. I would have nightmares about the people I left alone and suffering.
I am an EMT-B. This places me smack in the middle of the emergency care hierarchy. The top EMTs are the paramedics. They are full-time professionals who can insert airways that will allow you to breathe, place syringes into your chest cavity if your lungs collapse, or start an IV in your arm filled with enough morphine to make the bone-jarring ride to the hospital feel like you are a baby in its mother’s arms. Some paramedics wear paramilitary uniforms and people refer to them in awe as paragods because they appear to be a cross between emergency room physicians and Green Berets.
To become an EMT-B I had to take a difficult course, pass state and national boards, work hours in the hospital emergency room, and keep my skills polished enough to recertify every few years. Although I am a volunteer at my fire department, and receive no salary, my training is the same as the paid professionals’.
As an EMT-B I can help you administer your own nitroglycerin if you are having a heart attack, shoot you in the thigh with a syringe of epinephrine if you are in anaphylactic shock, and stick a plastic airway into your throat and pump air into your lungs if you stop breathing. I can zap you back to life with a defibrillator if your heart stops. I can help you give birth to your baby in the back of the ambulance.
On the job I don’t look like much. My favorite uniform is a used blue gabardine jacket with a brown corduroy collar that says GEORGETOWN EMS across the back in light-reflective two-inch letters. By the time I got it, its previous owners had lost the thermal liner, and so it is as limp as a Kleenex from years of wear. In the winter the wind whips through it; in the summer it sags from humidity. There are bleach and disinfectant stains on it from EMTs who wore this jacket before me and who tried to remove the effluvium of various sick people, drunks, women in labor, and the nearly dead who regularly ride with us in the back of our ambulance.
Many EMTs at level B look sharp. But they don’t work for my town. They work in the surrounding wealthier towns of Fairfield County, Connecticut— towns such as Westport and New Canaan. These EMTs work on assigned shifts and wear crisp uniforms and sport important-looking gold badges. Their ambulances are replaced every few years from their towns’ big budgets. Our ambulance is old, its interior is avocado green Naugahyde, the shag rugs in the driver’s compartment thin with age. Our ambulance sputters and lurches and drips green fluid from its underbelly. When we pull up to the hospital and park it alongside the fancy ambulances, the security staff knows us on sight. They look at us like we are the Beverly Hillbillies arriving in the rattle-ass truck with Granny sitting on top in her rocker.
I took my EMT training in the posh town of New Canaan, where the ambulance cot blankets look like the monogrammed coverings of show horses. In short time I noted that our instructors had two ways of explaining how to remedy any situation. “In New Canaan we would use this stretcher strap or cravat, but for those of you who will be in service in other towns [glance toward me] you can always use duct tape instead.” In my imagination, if our ambulance service had a heraldic crest, it would be a roll of duct tape on a field of spilled oil. Duct tape (which I confess I have never once seen used in my time as a Georgetown EMT) became the operative semantic symbol of the dividing line between Fairfield County snooty and Fairfield County down-to-earth.
When I became an EMT my friends were confounded. In fact, they thought it was ridiculous. They knew me to be a woman deeply and neurotically terrified of sick and dead people, a raging former urban Jewish hypochondriac on the order of Woody Allen, a sufferer from motion sickness in moving vehicles who always threatened to vomit if I was not allowed the front seat. I was someone who loved my sleep and privacy and tried never to go out in public without looking well-groomed.
But the closest I have ever felt to God is in the back of my ambulance. The most fully alive I have felt was when I held a dead man’s head wedged between my knees and ventilated him back to life. One of the most precious moments of my life was the night I connected with a dying crack addict with AIDS who shared the same taste in gospel music as I do.
In my real life I am a writer for
Gourmet
magazine, but I am in bliss after a hard call when my coworkers and I pull the ambulance up to Dunkin’ Donuts and share greasy crullers and a big cup of stomach-churning coffee and vent out all the stress to each other.
This is my story, about life and death, fear and joy, good and evil as seen from the back of an ambulance in a small town in Connecticut. Although it is my experience, it is also about all the rescue workers who will save your life if you call 911. None of us is unique. We are the people who know the secrets behind the closed doors on every street in town, and we are there to protect you from harm when you call.
What is different about my story is that in helping others I learned to help myself. Becoming part of a firehouse and working side by side with the men and women of the Georgetown Volunteer Fire Department saved me from a spiral into depression and middle-age angst. It was the hardest and the most rewarding task I ever set for myself. In doing so I found a family within the town I lived in, and learned that I could face what scared me in life. That is the story I will tell in this book.
2
My hometown has its own zip code and its own phone prefix, but it is not really a town in the normal scheme of things. Instead it is a patchwork quilt of a place. In addition to a small hunk of land called Georgetown it is made up of scraps and end pieces of the bigger and wealthier towns that surround it. It includes pieces of Redding and Wilton, a bit of Ridgefield and Weston, too. Georgetown is about an hour and twenty minutes from New York City but feels light-years away. One of our volunteer company fire trucks has THE HUB OF FAIR-FIELD COUNTY painted on it, but Georgetown is only hub-like in that people roar through it on the way to someplace else. Not much happens in Georgetown, at least for the casual observer to see.
The Georgetown Volunteer Fire Company is situated across the street from the defunct Gilbert and Bennett wire mill that remains the centerpiece of the town. Once a thriving seat of industry when it began producing wire insect screening in 1861, then went on to manufacture meat and cheese safes, coal screens, and ox muzzles, it is now a crumbling castle of neglect. The huge ghostly building has been unoccupied for years; its windows are mostly all smashed in.
There are always town plans to
do something
with the property, to turn it into a spiffy housing community, loft spaces for artists, or a block of boutiques; but despite the creative ideas and slews of potential investors, the factory still sits abandoned.
When my husband, Michael, and I moved to the Redding part of Georgetown in 1982, we came from Weston, a mere five miles away. It was like coming to another country. Weston was the classic rich man’s commuting town. Movie stars and CEOs lived there. The town center was a modest island of upmarket stores. The drugstore sold scented French candles and coffee table books about sailing. The main street of Georgetown was remarkable for its utter lack of yuppie charms. When we moved here, the main street had many liquor stores, a TV repair store that threw the nonfixable sets out on the pavement, and an old-fashioned barbershop whose owner probably had never heard of Frederick Fekkai.
While the surrounding towns are a source of endless magazine and local newspaper articles about their well-protected wildlife, scenic roads, and artistic residents, news from Georgetown seems to revolve around public sewers that are always backing up into local businesses and the fate of the defunct wire factory that sits like a toad in the middle of town. Georgetown was the town that the commuter train to New York whizzed past, shaking the down-at-the-heels houses on both sides of the tracks.
Technically Michael and I live in West Redding, but we are so close to Georgetown, that is where our fire tax goes, and that is the fire department that comes if we call 911. We moved from Weston to West Redding because we wanted to be in a more rural area. Weston was too expensive for us to move to a bigger and nicer house, while the Georgetown end of West Redding was still affordable. Weston had become a commuter town while West Redding, ten minutes farther from New York City by Metro-North, the commuter train, still had a country air about it. Even though Georgetown center was a stone’s throw from our house, we disengaged ourselves from it emotionally when we bought a cheerful yellow colonial house high on a hill in West Redding. We hoped that when friends came to visit they would not notice the ugly old mill and the dreary main street of Georgetown, but would spring back to consciousness when, a mile up the road, where we lived on Wayside Lane, everything became leafy and bucolic again.
For years I passed the Georgetown Volunteer Fire Company on the way to the post office or the bank. I knew it was there but it never intrigued me. It had no sense of mystery about it the way the old wire mill did or the houses by the railroad tracks. The firehouse is a mundane redbrick building with a flagpole that flies an American flag and a second flag commemorating POWs and MIAs. Occasionally I would see the fire trucks lined up outside or see the ambulance zooming out of its parking bay. I never paid much attention; it was just part of the local landscape.
I had called 911 only one time since moving to Georgetown. I called to rat out a neighbor whose property borders mine, who liked to burn huge amounts of brush in bonfires so large that they threatened to leap across the property line and set my house on fire. I hid when I heard the fire trucks coming, to make sure the man didn’t know I had turned him in, and I peeked out from the second-floor window to see the firemen extinguishing the blaze and watch the pantomime of the men lecturing my neighbor not to do it again. I was never a fan of emergencies of any nature. If there was an accident on the highway, I tucked my head in my hands and didn’t look. I feared death and disfigurement. I did not want to see pain or blood or broken glass.
Outside the Georgetown Volunteer Fire Company was placed the kind of sign that you stick magnetic letters on, like a deli or a church has. The sign was always there. It said:
VOLS. WANTED . . .
FIRE EMS
Sometimes, if the wind had blown off a few letters it read VOS WANT D. It too was just part of the scenery. I was fifty-two years old. I was not going to be a fireman. But there was something about the EMS part of the sign that stuck in my mind. It pointed me to everything cowardly I knew about myself, about my fear of death and disease, my claustrophobia about being in moving vehicles that I am not driving. I was so suggestible about illness that I never watched the popular hospital shows like
ER.
I was not an EMT groupie, but something about the sign would not leave my mind.
Looking back, to do something that went against the way I defined myself should not have seemed so surprising. I was having a midlife “event,” if not a full-blown crisis. This event entailed trying to think about ways I could make my life less miserable.
I was miserable. In fact, I was clinically depressed. I had spent my whole life paralyzed by my fears. Fearfulness and general nutty behavior was a family legacy. I had a grandmother who was so agoraphobic that she did not leave her house for thirty years; I had a father who had a dozen tics and suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as from the consequences of having a steel plate surgically implanted in his skull from a horrendous head-trauma accident he suffered as a child. He flew into fits and rages at the slightest provocation. Just about everyone in my family was odd in some way. Despite becoming successful professionals, my aunts, uncles, and cousins wouldn’t fly, wouldn’t take boats, wouldn’t use public phones, 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 spoken about 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 Pilgrim State Hospital for the Insane after being removed from a White House bedroom where he was caught looking for Harry Truman’s daughter while wearing a woman’s mink coat.
At age fifty-two, 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 that I looked like shit. 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 chair, a green leather recliner, watching TV. I knew by heart the timetable for Ricki Lake, Oprah, and Sally. I sat, I ate, and I watched TV. My pants grew tight and I didn’t care. Michael and I had started to drift apart. After more than thirty years of marriage and a long career together it seemed that he had blossomed and I had wilted on the vine. He was active and trim, riding his horse daily, having coffee with a close group of friends, while I sat in my bathrobe looking at shows like “My Wild Teen Wants to Have a Baby.” I hated myself, and the spiral of depression fed by self-loathing exacerbated the growing chasm between us.
I was able to pull myself together for the occasional business meeting or lunch in New York with an editor, but my days at home were long and empty and sad. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Friends started to slip away. I didn’t return phone calls; I let letters pile up on my desk. Who had the energy to engage with people? Not I. The highlight of my day was a drive out to the supermarket for magazines and cookies. Once I looked down and realized I was wearing my bedroom slippers instead of shoes.
I used to like to have people over for dinner. Now the mahogany dining table we had worked so hard to afford sat covered with a layer of dust. Candles that I had lovingly placed in silver holders sagged and I left them un-straightened. I went to the local library and took out books. I was looking at one on depression when the librarian came up to me and said, “I haven’t seen you in a while. What are you working on?”
I was mortified. I was working on getting out of bed, which took hours. I don’t think she wanted to hear this. “Oh, some great new projects,” I lied; and she walked away with a chipper it’s-always-great-to-see-local-authors smile. I put the library on my rapidly growing avoidance list. People knew me there and I would have to pretend to be normal.
I dreaded going out of the house. I could hardly drive my car anymore without panic and anxiety taking over. If I had been a drinker I would have self-medicated and become a drunk. Instead I ate cookies and my pants got snugger. I signed up for the gym, lasted through one session, and never went back.
The anxiety was possibly worse than the depression. At least the depression had me in bed each day at one in the afternoon for my three-hour nap, exhausted from a morning of watching TV and doing nothing. “Don’t you want to go to the barn with me and see the horses?” Michael asked.
I knew my horse was going unridden, and probably felt abandoned. “Maybe tomorrow,” I said, and drifted off to the sweet sleep of temporary oblivion. Riding seemed an impossibility. Sometimes I would go to the closet in the bathroom where I kept the manicure utensils and nail polishes and look at them, I would pick out a polish and go back to sitting in my chair. I looked down and my feet seemed too far away to deal with, too much effort, too great a stretch.
Michael and I were working on weekly segments for a show to which we contributed on National Public Radio. We would broadcast each week sounding like we had the greatest job in the world: chipper, the world’s most loving couple, the happiest people on earth. Our producer called and told us that radio listeners wanted to meet us, and we were to fly to Minneapolis, where the radio station had arranged a bus trip with our fans to a restaurant about three hours into the country.
I wondered if I could do all this. First I had to pull myself together and pack for the trip. I had to look decent; I could not meet National Public Radio listeners in my blue bathrobe. Then Michael and I had to take a plane trip, something we had done often but that I always dreaded. Fear of flying was high on my list of discomforts. And then, once we landed, I had to do the most heinous thing of all: ride on a bus. It had been thirty-five years since I’d set foot on one. I was totally phobic about buses. I hated public transportation, refused to take it, and now three hours with a group of strangers on a bus going who-knows-where . . . well, it was not something I looked forward to.
The producer of our show, Sally Swift, is a wonderful person—smart, funny, and sympathetic; so I got up the nerve to be candid with her. “I don’t do buses,” I said. I felt like a diva; in fact I was a depressed mess. After about twenty minutes of explanation, we agreed that Michael would ride the bus and I would follow behind the bus in Sally’s car.
“I’ll try to get on the bus, maybe it will work,” I said to Michael. On the flight to Minneapolis I practiced thinking about a bus, and then getting on it. I visualized what a bus looked like. The only buses I rode were the ones from the airport to the car rental place and I hyper-ventilated the whole time. Being a passenger put me out of control, and all my anxiety stemmed from a fear of forfeiting or losing control. If I couldn’t drive the bus or have Michael drive it, it was unbearable. The more I knew that someone else controlled the opening or closing of the bus doors, the higher my anxiety level went. To me, the air in the airport bus was stale and sickening, and the level of noise from people making happy conversation became shrieking and painful to my ears.
The night before the bus ride we went to Sally’s house for dinner. I wanted to cry. I wanted her life. She was thin and athletic and pregnant with her second baby. Her first child was gorgeous and sweet and the house she and her husband, Tom, lived in was perfect. Every object was aesthetically lovely, her garden bright and blooming with herbs and flowers, the food she served a bounty of homegrown vegetables and delicious homemade breads. It was also perfectly casual; Sally wore her trademark bright red sneakers and seemed to host the dinner party effortlessly. I wanted her life—but what the hell would I do with it? The flowers and fruits would all wilt and rot as I sat in my green chair and watched the
Ricki Lake Show.
I was nauseous from the good health and calm that radiated from this happy household.
But the next morning I managed to pull myself together enough to resemble the bright chatty person people heard on the radio. These listeners were paying a hundred bucks apiece to meet Michael and me, so I felt it was the least I could do to wash my face. When Michael and I got to the bus in which we were going to spend the next six hours, I panicked. It looked like a car-rental bus and I didn’t like the driver’s looks. He looked like the type of person who would not stop the bus if I asked him to.