Ambulance Girl by Jane Stern Read Free Book Online

some time hemorrhage. If you are lucky and it is caught in time, you will not die.” He looks at me while he talks. I am now cyanotic, diaphoretic, and my pulse is bounding. “Stern, take your hand off your carotid artery,” he says. “Pressure there can stop blood supply to the brain.”
    So what?
I think.
I am almost dead anyway.
    By the twelfth class I see my notebook is filled with marginalia written from me to Dot and back. It bears the name of various physicians in the area. She wants to know who I use, who’s good, who returns phone calls. Clearly she is dying like me.
    The next class has me writing my shrink’s name over and over in the notebook margin as a totem that everything will be okay. It says “TOM KNOX” down the page, as if those seven letters can stop fears the way Superman’s cape does a speeding bullet. I have also written the word
bleech
in large wiggly letters—a word I haven’t used since I was a kid and found the word while reading Don Martin cartoons in
Mad
magazine.
    Bleech
(pronounced
blek
) is a great all-purpose word of disgust. It comes in handy for class. We are learning about internal bleeding and feces, and how we have to see if someone’s shit looks like coffee grounds, is dark and tarry, or gushing bright red. I think not.
    I am at this point determined to specialize in shitless EMT events. I am also placing vomit on the no-can-do list. Frank tells us that a great many 911 calls will have us finding the patient in the bathroom, having taken a swan dive from the toilet. Sorry. But I will not do toilets. I begin to wonder if Georgetown will let me have a specialty involving only coming to calls where people are fully dressed and dry of ass. I am still thinking about blood as an option, but I have already decided that shit and vomit will not work for me.
    Chad Howard has rescued us from Frank’s odious world of “bleech.” He is giving a class on the most innocuous practical subject: physical fitness. How not to strain our knees and backs while lifting people.
    Chad is a young physical therapist. He is also a major hottie, blond and rippling with muscles and dressed in an endearingly dissolute preppy manner. Dot and I have pulled our desks closer together to better assess this situation. The margins of our notebooks are filled with lascivious scribbles. “He is WAY too cute,” she writes to me. I feel like we are preteen fans of ’N Sync.
    I ask her how old she is.
    “40,” she writes back. “You?”
    I write “53
.”
I am more than twice Chad’s age. Dot and I don’t listen to a word he says. We don’t really need to pay attention to what he says; it is all written down in the instruction sheets we will get at the end of class. Instead we watch him squatting and lifting the Rescue Randy, and we see his corded tan forearms flex and the muscles in his thighs under his chinos expand as he shows us how to flex at the knees to save our backs. His cute butt is in the air, his shirt rides up to show six inches of smooth hairless back.
    Frank is hanging out in the back of the room and looks like he desperately needs a smoke. He calls a break, and Dot and I swoon like schoolgirls, or maybe like vile old leering men at a topless bar.
    When the class resumes Frank and Chad call on a volunteer to play an unconscious patient. My hand shoots in the air. Maybe I think Chad will lie on top of me and we can make out. I don’t know what I am thinking, until I am lying on the linoleum floor with my eyes closed and I hear Frank tell the class that he and Chad will now hoist me in the air and place me in the stair chair (a piece of rescue apparatus used when a stretcher is too big to fit the surroundings).
    I have for the first time in my life forgotten that I weigh a lot. I mean, I really weigh a lot. I never tell anyone my weight, I would never volunteer to have anyone gauge how heavy I am. The last time I even approached the situation of being airborne was twenty-five years ago when I