Ambulance Girl by Jane Stern Read Free Book Online Page B

to complain,” we are told. This I suspect is a serious understatement.
    I am not taking notes; instead I draw pictures of a handbag I saw at Neiman Marcus, I draw crucifixes with jewels on them, I make a shopping list of food I need to buy for tomorrow’s dinner. I am looking for comfort, for anything not to have to think about stretching a stockbroker’s leg until his bones snap back into place.
    Sometimes I think I am too stupid for this class. I cannot remember how many liters of oxygen is in an M-sized O 2 tank. Other times I think the class is too stupid for me. We are lectured on the following things:
    Do not try to replace someone’s organs if they are hanging from their body.
    Do not give CPR to a severed head.
    Do not try to revive someone who is in a state of advanced decomposition.
    If you have a patient whose leg or arm is partially amputated, do not pull it off to make things “neat.”
    I wonder who would do these things:
I think the pancreas goes here; this looks like a gallbladder, let’s shove it
in here.
    I imagine myself doing chest compressions on a headless body from a car wreck and then running twenty feet down the highway blowing air into the mouth of a severed head. I scribble a note to Dot, who looks as aghast as I do. She seems to think that they are covering all the bases, I seem to think they wouldn’t mention this if someone hadn’t tried to do it.
    I imagine myself as the Martha Stewart of EMTs, pulling off ragged limbs to make the victim look more tidy. Maybe I could sew a calico edge along the wound, or crochet a lace trim on the cusp of an amputated leg, like I did with Soft Baby, my teddy bear.
    Frank gives us one of the acronyms we will live by: DCAP-BTLS, which stands for deformities, contusions, abrasions, punctures, burns, tenderness, lacerations, and swelling. With the inevitable macabre slide show we see examples of each of the above. For abrasions we see a slide of someone who was wearing a T-shirt when he dumped his motorcycle at seventy miles an hour. Seasoned EMTs call motorcycles donorcycles because so many people die on them and their organs go to the waiting list of needy people. The man in the picture looks like Johnny Depp but he has no skin on his back. “Bad case of road rash,” Frank says flatly.
    In my notebook margin I have written a note to myself: “If you have to get up for air, just go.” Underneath, I sign my shrink’s name, imitating the unique loopy signature that I have seen on my prescriptions. And then another quote of his from his days as a medical student at Johns Hopkins. “You get used to it,” he told me. I wonder if I will.
    I look over at Dot, who is looking at the slide, her face a knot beneath her spiked hairdo. I look at one of the young firemen. “Gross,” he says, followed by “Cool.” He raises his hand. “Frank, do we get to see any autopsies?” That’s it. I get up and run outside to the fresh air to die alone with dignity.
    There are things I love in class and things I hate. I love bones, they are white and clean and make sense in their architectural order. I love mentally altered states; the tragic drunks and psychos appeal to me. I love splinting and taping and wrapping the patient in what is called “a hospital ready package.” I like the cleanliness of white gauze and the four-by-four squares used to make occlusive dressings for sucking puncture wounds.
    My hate list includes avulsions—big flaps of skin that hang like slices of corned beef from people’s scalps. The birth of a baby in the back of the rig is supposed to be every EMT’s happiest moment, but the movie we are shown in class of swollen pulsating vaginas disgorging placentas and pools of blood revolts me.
    Dot, who has two daughters, digs childbirth. Because she and I will be on the same ambulance service, I write her a note and slip it to her: “I HATE this. . . . If anyone has a baby, YOU have to do everything.”
    “It’s a deal,” she writes