Ambulance Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

ischium, meniscus, calcaneus, acetabulum:
I moved them around in my mouth like smooth lapidary pebbles. I loved the word
cyanotic,
meaning blue from lack of oxygen. We saw slides. Dead was a gray blue like the churning waters off Gloucester, Massachusetts.
    I was immediately good in class, but it was only because I knew the bones of the body from my years as an art student. Art was what I had majored in as an undergraduate as well as a grad student for seven academic years (about as long as it takes to become a medical doctor). I sketched and painted the human body. I came to know it draped and disrobed, fat and thin, young and old. I especially loved anatomy, loved tracing my hand across the ivory bones of the class skeleton, loved the books that showed the body dissected to reveal flaps of muscle and cartilage. Like architects building a house, as artists we had to learn what held this thing called the human body together. We had to know how it moved, and what lay under the skin.
    I was strong coming out of the starting gate as an EMT. I had a leg up, I knew my tibia from my fibula. I hugged my white plastic loose-leaf to my chest as I left the class at the end of the night. I could do this. I knew things.
    My jump start didn’t last long. Was it possible that when I was younger and went to school five days a week that my brain could absorb as much information as I was getting now? Now I felt overwhelmed with facts. It was different than when I was a child. I remember classes and I remember homework, but this was unique. Maybe I cared more now, maybe my brain, like the rest of me, had slowed down. I wondered if the antidepressants were causing brain lock. I looked around the class and wondered if anyone else felt as overwhelmed and flooded as I did.
    I think that I cared too much. I was the one who sat taking notes like mad. I was the one who always had my hand in the air. What Frank said to the class seemed like the wisdom on the tablets God gave to Moses.
    Frank explains to us the correct placement of a plastic airway into the patient’s throat. I can see myself ham-handed in the back of an ambulance, inserting the airway the wrong way. I cringe, and turn around to see the slack faces of my fellow classmates. They do not share my intensity, my horror of missing any of the minutiae. I see one of the two identical-looking Spanish sisters who have joined the class pushing her cuticles back. She is not listening. I am thinking, What if she was the EMT in an ambulance when I stopped breathing? What if someone handed her the plastic airway and she had not remembered that Frank had said something about putting it in one way and then flipping it around the opposite way during insertion? It ceases to matter, because after two more classes both sisters dropped out. I ran into them on the streets of the town two weeks later and asked them what happened. “Too gross,” they say in unison. They didn’t like the slides of people with their brains spilling out.
    I am amazed I have stuck it out this far.
    Frank is our main teacher but he is joined by five different paramedics from time to time who come in to lecture us. They seem to me to be a good ol’ boys club. I think they regard us students as insignificant fleas skirling about on the surface of emergency medicine. During the breaks they ignore us and laugh and talk with each other.
    Even though they hang together they all have different personalities. There is Ralph Miro, a trim, neatly dressed man who comes to lecture us wearing a well-cut suit and tie instead of the coplike uniform that Frank and the others must wear on the job. Despite his sartorial style he is the one who brings the most horrific slides to show us, and clearly delights in raising the squirm factor. He wants to scare away those who can’t take it, or who think EMT is holding the hand of an attractive person with a hangnail and offering comfort and a bandage.
    Ralph’s photos are straight from the hospital