Ambulance Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

I got careless and accidentally knocked George’s severed head off the windowsill, and it lay in the courtyard of the fancy building on Fifth Avenue that abutted the townhouse in which I lived with my parents. No matter how I cried and pleaded, the doorman would not leave his post and retrieve my bear’s head from the courtyard. Formidable in his large great coat and cap, he sent me packing. He did not understand this was a medical emergency . . . a 911 call.
    I started my real EMT training course on a freezing winter’s day in the lecture room of the New Canaan police station. The cops behind the bulletproof window glowered as I entered. There were no kind looks given to me or the other forty people in the class who followed me in. We may not have been perps but we were interlopers in the cops’ sanctuary. Over the microphone and through the bulletproof glass we were told not to loiter in the lobby, not to talk to the police, not to park in the nearby spaces in the parking lot reserved for police cars . . . to generally get lost, sit down, and shut up.
    I immediately got so nervous I lost one of my favorite earrings, dropped my eyeglasses and bent the frames, and spilled the contents of my purse on the floor. None of the students made eye contact with each other. Everyone looked grim and nervous. The majority of the class were young men, firefighters or police trainees looking for their EMT certification.
    The class ran three hours. We were given the textbooks. I opened mine at random and saw a large color photo of a man with half his head missing and his brain pouring out like gray pudding. I turned the page. There was a photo of a partial amputation of a limb, the jagged white bone protruding from what looked like a steamship round of beef. I turned it again and there was someone with third-degree burns on his penis, his skin hanging like scarlet ribbons down his leg. I felt the latte I had brought to class from the nearby Starbuck’s roaring in the wrong direction up my gullet. Old, fat, and singleearringed, I prayed to not puke all over myself the first day. I tried to fade into the crowd.
    Our instructor was a paramedic named Frank Posca. I wanted Frank to like me but he made it clear he was not interested in friendship from anyone in the class. He was a tattooed ex-military man, a veteran of the streets of Bridgeport, where from the back of the ambulance he worked on a regular basis with crack addicts and glue sniffers and failed suicides. Frank was short and wide, a cinder block of a man with a closely barbered head and a tiny gold earring.
    When I look now at the big white plastic loose-leaf notebook I carried to the class over the long months ahead, I see how neat and tidy my writing was in those first few classes. How I copied down in a firm black pen such nuggets of wisdom as “Professional attributes of an EMT are a neat clean appearance, current knowledge and skills, attention to patient care.” I wondered if someone with their brain hanging out of their head would notice my “neat clean appearance” or my missing earring and bent eyeglasses.
    Printed and in large letters in my notebook were Frank’s words of warning that first day: “EMT is the most stressful job of all!” And below that, a list of the warning signs of stress, which included “anxiety, guilt, indecisiveness, isolation, fear of separation and being ignored.” Since I already had all these symptoms before I set foot in the class, I wondered how I would know when the job was getting to me.
    EMT training is like boot camp. This was a new way of learning to me. I was a product of exclusive Ivy League schools and progressive preps. My teachers were there to nurture me, to gently water the seed of my talents and coax it to the sunlight. The first day of class Frank had us all bellowing in unison the watchwords for becoming an EMT: “BSI . . . I’m number one!” we screamed.
    BSI means Body Substance Isolation, i.e., protective gloves