Free Ambulance Girl by Jane Stern Page B

acknowledge me, but just motion to me as an extra set of hands to help hold down a patient or administer a procedure—that’s all I am given as directives.
    “You,” they call me. “Come here.”
    I have slung my stethoscope around my neck so I look like one of them. I am wearing heavy steel-toed boots that looked uniformlike when I put them on and now look vaguely Nazi-ish. I look like I am ready for guerrilla combat.
    “You,” the head nurse says. “Go to number ten and help out.” Number ten is the curtain-draped cubicle in which a woman with advanced Alzheimer’s and a host of other problems has been taken to the ER by her daughter.
    “Hi, I’m Jane,” I say to the daughter, who is my age. “What seems to be wrong with your mother?”
    What seems to be wrong is that her mother, Alice, slipped into a coma a week ago. I look down at the bed. Alice has already been here for two hours and is hooked up to various monitors that beep and flash. Her eyes are closed, her white hair, in loose threads unraveling from a bun, falls around the pillow. She is old and small, child-like, actually.
    “She won’t wake up,” the daughter tells me. She has been this way for some time.
    I touch Alice’s arm. I look at her chart. I see her name.
    “Hello, Alice,” I say.
    Alice opens bright blue eyes and looks directly at me. “Hello,” she says back.
    The daughter lets out a scream, followed by cries to the Virgin Mary. “It’s a miracle!” she cries. The nurse comes running into the cubicle.
    “What’s happening in here?” she says accusingly at me.
    “It’s a miracle,” the daughter is still yelling. She points to me. “She brought my mother back.”
    The nurse glares at me. “What did you do?”
    “Nothing,” I stammer. “I just said hello.”
    The daughter has her arms around me. She is thanking the Blessed Virgin, she is thanking me. The commotion is causing a scene. I try to back out of the room.
    “No, you can’t leave,” says the daughter. “You saved my mother.”
    I mumble something about being right back and take my miracle-working self away before more crowds of people form.
    I am actually feeling pretty terrific. Maybe I am a healer of some sort, able to pull people out of comas. I stand in the center of the aisle as a patient on an ambulance cot is pushed into Room 6.
    “You!” another nurse yells at me, breaking my moment of basking. “Come here.” I float in, thinking another person needs my laying on of hands.
    “Spread his butt cheeks,” the nurse says to me, and pulls down the sheet. She is holding a rectal thermometer, and this is a three-handed job. I have never spread a stranger’s ass before. The patient is having a seizure and an oral thermometer can’t be used. I take a deep breath and grab a butt cheek in each hand and pull. She inserts the thermometer. We wait a few moments for it to register. I think of small talk to make. Nothing comes to mind. She whips out the thermometer and briskly walks out of the room. I am left holding the man’s butt apart. I stand that way for a few moments and then realize it is probably safe for me to let go. I walk out to the sink, strip off my gloves, wash my hands, and reglove.
    “Come in here,” someone yells at me. In Room 4 there is a knot of nurses and orderlies. Before I go in I can smell booze. On the hospital bed is a man in his early forties. He wears an expensive suit, tasseled loafers, a gold signet ring on his finger, and a handsome, heavy watch. He was found passed out in his car on the Merritt Parkway heading into work during rush hour.
    “We need to undress him,” I am told, so I start helping the nurses get him out of his clothing and into a hospital johnny coat. This would normally not be too hard to accomplish except that this man is undergoing what the intern tells the charge nurse is “the worst case of DTs I have ever seen.” The delirium tremens brought on from going cold turkey after a weekend orgy of booze