Ambulance Girl by Jane Stern

and drugs have left our guy jerking around and levitating from the bed like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist.
“Call all the interns,” I hear a doctor say. “They should see this.”
    “You,” the nurse says to me. “Get him undressed.”
    I am left alone with this man who every five seconds thrashes his body into a position of rigor, then goes limp. An arm flails out, a leg. His head rolls from side to side. He is strapped to the bed, and like a magician I must denude him through his tie-downs. I manage to take off the suit jacket. It has a Paul Stuart label inside. The watch is a Breitling, his signet ring is from Harvard. I unbutton his shirt and between his thrashing manage to get it off him. He is now in a strap undershirt. I step back to catch my breath and take a good look at him. He is handsome, but I notice he is wearing fake bronzer that stops at his neck. His body is a funny yellowish color.
    The nurse comes in. “What’s taking so long?” she says. “Get his pants off, we have to take a rectal temperature.” I yank at his pants, then his boxer shorts. “I’m sorry,” I mutter to him because he obviously didn’t start his day thinking he was going to be dying in the hospital ER with a stranger pulling down his pants. We turn him on his stomach and I spread his ass cheeks for the nurse. I now have a specialty in the wonderful world of emergency medicine.
    The man is hooked up to an IV. A Chinese intern is injecting Valium in the line to try to stop his seizures. I like this intern because he is the only person so far who has conversed with me.
    “Wow,” he says when the drugs have no effect. “This guy is like an elephant, he needs so much sedation.”
    The doctor turns to get more drugs and I am asked to hold the man down so he will not hurt himself. I sit on his legs, because without my ballast the bed he is on rolls itself out into the hallway, that’s how much he is rocking and kicking. He is slick with sweat; I feel like I am wrestling a large swordfish.
    I watch the nurses go through his wallet. I look at the contents. A driver’s license, a gold American Express card, some business cards, his business card. He appears to be an attorney at a New York law office. There is a faded dog-eared picture of him standing on a beach in what looks to be Hawaii or some other tropical paradise, with his arm around a nice-looking woman and two young boys in front of them.
    “That’s got to be his family,” I hear the nurse say.
    She disappears and comes back fifteen minutes later. I am still trying to hold him down so he does not injure himself.
    “I got through to his wife: divorced. She doesn’t want any part of him,” she says flatly to an aide. “Says she has been through enough and that we should call his work if we need to talk to anybody. She seems to think he has no friends left who care about him.”
    The IV medicine has finally stopped his thrashing. He is relatively still. I speak his name, trying out my newly minted skill as miracle worker. He does not respond.
    “Wheel him up to Intensive Care,” says the nurse to an orderly.
    “Do you think he will live?” I ask the Chinese intern.
    “Doubtful,” he says.
    I watch the man being wheeled away to Intensive Care. I imagine the final call to his wife who doesn’t care. To his boss. Will anyone come to his funeral? One of the strange things about emergency medicine, at least for EMTs, is we seldom know what happens to the patient after they leave our care. Our relationship with our patients is short and intense, there is no aftercare or follow-up by us. Sometimes the way we find out what happened is to read the obituary in the local paper.
    The man with the DTs has taken an emotional and physical toll on me. I would like to sit down for a while but I can’t. As soon as I spy a chair I am summoned by a nurse. “We need help in the isolation unit,” she says. I am pointed in the direction of the holding tank for violent and mentally