Ambulance Girl Read Online Free PDF

and, if necessary, a mask and eye protection and perhaps full fireman’s turnout gear complete with self-contained breathing apparatus. If you are an EMT you do not go into a scene and you do not even think of touching patients without at least a barrier of rubber between you and them.
    “I’m number one” means that you are important to yourself and to the rescue unit. If you arrive at the scene of an emergency and someone is pointing a gun at you, the house is burning down, toxic fumes are clouding the air, or a psychotic is telling you the Martians have ordered him to kill you now, you do not attempt to be a hero. You run for cover and get help. That is what being number one is all about.
    When I left the first class I was so wrung out that my hands shook. I could hardly unlock my car door. As I drove home, it started to snow. I felt the car skid as I made the turns on the back roads. What if I had an accident and had to call 911? Could I tell them I was sort of one of them?
    I got home shortly before midnight. It was late and Michael had gone to bed. I made myself a toasted bagel with cream cheese, sat downstairs in the den, and flipped the channel of the TV to an old Bette Davis movie. I thought of the gruesome pictures in the textbook and felt queasy again. I pushed the bagel aside, walked upstairs, and crawled into bed next to Michael, basking in his warmth. Safe for now.
    The class met three times a week. Being back in a classroom flooded me with memories of childhood. I was now significantly bigger than the last time I sat at a school desk, and I now found the chair with the writing board that swung around under my right arm constrictive. I also had a lot more “stuff” than I did as a kid—a purse, a coffee mug—and I was minus a locker or cubbyhole in which to stash it.
    I arrived chronically early to the class, scouted out my favorite chair on the far left of the front row, attractive to me because it was close to a window ledge where I could rest my stainless steel tankard of coffee, my handbag, and my textbooks.
    Buying the notebook and pens for the class was a rush of nostalgia. I had not handled three-ring lined notebook paper in years. I bought a plastic pouch to hold pens and pencils, colorful plastic dividers to segregate one class neatly from another. I arrived freshly scrubbed, bright-eyed, and eager. I smiled at everyone who came in. Few returned my glance.
    I was not the oldest person in the class. There were two people my senior. One was a small-boned woman, thin and jittery. The other was a man with a gray woolly head and thick glasses. My first thought when I looked at them was, They don’t belong here. They were too old, too dilapidated. I smelled trouble; they would have special needs, be slow, be irritating. Ungenerous in my assessment, I wanted them out. I dreaded that anyone might think I was like them. Sure, I was more than thirty years older than most of my classmates, but it was obvious these people were really old and didn’t belong here.
    The jittery lady lasted one class. She fidgeted through the lecture and I saw her handing her textbook back to Frank at the end. I tried to make eye contact with her as she left the room but she held her head down.
    The human body as I first learned about it as an EMT is a stick figure. That is what I drew in my notebook during the lecture. This stick man had lines going through him. Sideways he was cut into anterior and posterior segments, through the chest he was midclavicular, his twiglike fingers were distal to his medial section, his single line of a chest was proximal to his heart. The stick man’s spine was divided into four sections. His cervical spinal process, his thoracic region, his lumbar region, and his sacral region. A big black ink splotch on his anterior thorax showed the xiphoid process, “landmark for all CPR compressions,” we were told.
    I loved the words of the body’s geometry. They were poetry to me.
Scapula, maxilla,