Free Population 485 by Michael Perry Page A

the cot. She immediately began to retch. Donnie slapped a towel to her chin, but only succeeded in deflecting the subsequent explosion of dark brown vomit across the wall and over the blankets. It was a copious projectile eruption that left the cot drenched. Like a flu-ridden chorus line, the arc of family bent at the waist and barfed on the carpet. We see this sometimes. It’s what you call a sympathy puke.
    We loaded the cot, and Donnie and Todd sprinted for the front seats. It is not standard training procedure to abandon the rookie in the back. Helen squinted her eyes shut tight, howled, and puked again. There is a little door between the front and the rear of the ambulance. It is never closed. Todd snapped it shut. Helen howled, paused again to hurl, then howled nonstop to the hospital. I never could figure out what the trouble was. She wouldn’t talk. The floor was slick with soupy brown spew. The air was rank with the smell of onions and something vaguely Parmesan. The windows opened out at the bottom, only about an inch. I’d hold my breath while taking Helen’s vital signs, then lurch to the base of the window to inhale. The howling was unceasing. Todd kept leering through the little communicating window in the latched door. One day he will reside in a lower circle of Hell.
    The thing was, other than the soles of my boots, I had managed to stay vomitus-free. I probably tracked a little into the hospital when we got there, and I had Donnie grab an emesis basin before we took the five-floor elevator ride to the medical floor, but Helen’s howling and eruptions had waned to nothing, and my uniform was still dry when we docked the cot beside her hospital bed. It took six of us to lift her across the gap. I was positioned at the head of the bed, about a foot from her face. Right mid-lift, when I had her great weight in my arms, she swiveled her head, looked me in the eye, and bound up her guts for one last mighty heave. Donnie slung the emesis basin at me, and I managed to catch the first few bursts, but she just kept puking. The basin became full. I called for another. Everyone just stared. The basin overflowed, and vomit hit the floor, splattering my pant legs and pooling on my boots. There was a slight pause, and then Helen loosed a convulsive woof! , launching a final horrific geyser just past my right ear. I leapt back, but I was too late. She got me in the right shoulder, across the chest, and as a sort of sloppy coup de grace, sent a few trailing dribbles down the front of my pants.
    Down in the ER, I tried to clean up, but it was just silly. The boys put me in the back of the rig, shut the communicating door, and drove me home. When we stripped the cot, a glistening chunk of unchewed onion the size of a nightcrawler fell to the floor. I resolved to stay in the shower until shrunken.
    But I didn’t puke. And I never have.

    The thing about ambulance work is, you cannot dip your toe in the pool. You don’t know if you can stand the water until you dive in. When you’re training, long before you answer your first page, you wonder how you’ll handle the blood, you wonder how you’ll react to distorted limbs and protruding bone fragments, and you wonder if dead people will make you want to turn and run. I never remember wondering how I’d handle the puking. There’s no way to find out other than to get out there in it.
    The first heart attack I ever worked was near suppertime, and I and my partner, Fred—a part-time hospital orderly and experienced EMT—had just picked up sub sandwiches. They slid around the console as we whistled down the highway, out to a farmstead. Following the family, we ran up a hill behind the house, where there was a man lying on his back, looking waxen in the grass. While Fred set up the defibrillator, I popped out my pocket mask and prepared to start rescue breathing. The family dog ran around and around us. I remember being wound tight inside, scared and humming like a high