Ambulance Girl by Jane Stern Page B

and listened. The boy was placed on a stretcher and hauled into the back of the rig along with his girlfriend, and with lights and sirens furiously blaring, they headed to the hospital.
    The boy is suffering a bilateral hemopneumothorax, a fancy medical term that translates to the simple fact that his lungs have slowly collapsed after the impact of the accident and now he cannot breathe.
    It is interesting to see how fast an ER is transformed into one big lifesaving machine when a life hangs in the balance. Suddenly the slow methodical triage of cases is turned upside-down with doctors and nurses shouting and calling out orders. The trauma surgeon is paged, and as we wait for him to arrive, the boy is placed on a bed in the trauma unit of the ER. The paramedics are working on him.
    The boy looks like Axl Rose, lead singer of the rock band Guns N’ Roses: a handsome, lithe teenager with long satiny hair flowing down his back.
    He has been separated from his girlfriend, who is strapped to a spine board and wearing a cervical collar, awaiting treatment in another room. “Where’s Sammy?” the boarded girl keeps asking. “Is he okay?”
    Sammy is not okay. He is dying fast. His lungs have stopped functioning; he is trying to suck in air and it isn’t working. Yet he is still able to scream in pain and thrash about wildly on the table. He is drowning in reverse. The nurses and paramedics rush in to hold him down, and the trauma surgeon appears. He takes his scalpel and holds it to the side of the boy’s chest. The kid is trying to get up off the table. “Hold his legs down,” someone yells at me. I look up and see Ralph, the paramedic who always brought the worst slides to our class.
    I grab the kid’s legs. The nurses have taken off his clothing. I noticed he has a smooth, lovely chest. It had been a while since I had seen a young man naked. He is beautiful and he is dying. How do you put those things together? I stand dumbly and hold his kicking feet. A few inches from my face the trauma surgeon slices the boy’s side open and inserts a tube that will help inflate his lungs.
    The head nurse is holding his head. She is talking to him as he screams for help, for the pain to stop, for breath. “You’re going to be fine, honey, just hold on,” she says. Her face is deeply furrowed with compassion. “You’re going to be fine.”
    When his lungs start to work he stops kicking. “We don’t need you now,” I am told brusquely by the surgeon’s assistant. I stagger back a few paces. I take in the scene, the knife, the blood, the tubes. I feel I should faint. I walk into the hallway to an area that will give me room if I do pass out. As I wait to faint, I don’t. I am amazed. How can I watch what I just watched and still be standing? Maybe there is something in me that makes me able to do this. I go to the bathroom and throw water on my face. The crisis is over; the boy is being wheeled up to another part of the hospital. I can hear his girlfriend calling his name. I walk into the curtained cubicle.
    “Where’s Sammy?” she asks. She is clutching a CD case filled with discs. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she whimpers. “I’m scared.”
    I place my hand on her forehead. “Your friend is going to be fine,” I say. “I’ll get you a bedpan.”
    “I’m scared,” she says again. “Are my parents coming?” I look at this girl. She has a tattoo of thorns around her upper bicep and wears a heavy-metal T-shirt. Her face looks like that of a frightened eight-year-old.
    “I’ll ask the nurse,” I say as she holds on tight to her boyfriend’s CDs.
    By 8 P.M. my day in the ER is finally over. I go up to the head nurse but she is too busy to hear my good-bye. I wave at a few people in the beds waiting to see doctors. One nice lady has come in because she is burping a lot, another man is nervous that his heart is racing too fast. Like a candy striper in an old Gidget movie I fluff their pillows and make small