I watched as the men from Georgetown climbed ladders and fought the flames. The house, a gracious old Victorian, had fire coming from every window on every floor. Part of the roof had already collapsed, and the four people (a mother, father, and their two teenagers) screamed and swatted away embers that rained down on them.
I tried to remember everything I knew about burns, about the severity of different thicknesses, and how to use a table called the Rule of Nines, which measures the size and severity of a burn depending on where it is on the body and if it is on a child or an adult. I searched my memory for treatment of smoke inhalation, and how to use a burn blanket to cover singed flesh. My mouth was as dry as tinder as I approached the ambulance. Bernice was busy getting things inside the rig ready for the people on the roof when they were taken down. Two other ambulances from nearby towns pulled up, standing by in case any of the firemen were injured.
Firemen do not give up easily. When they start fighting a fire it is hard to tell them to stop. It is the EMTs’ job to monitor their blood pressures, check for oxygen levels and exhaustion, and help make the call that tells them that they are not to go back to the fire because their health is at risk. If you do, you must prepare to be cursed at by them. They do not want to leave.
Watching our firemen battle the blaze was like watching someone voluntarily going into hell. Fire is tactile; it gets into your pores, in your hair, in your mouth; you can chew on its taste and rub it from your eyes. The closer you get, the more it paws at you, licks at you like a rough-tongued cat. Our men were right above the flames, the roof was about to collapse, and with the aerial truck they were coming in for the final attempt to pull the people off the roof.
Huddled in the basket atop the aerial truck, the family was slowly lowered down. When they hit ground level we EMTs took over. Many things beside the fire could still kill them, including hypothermia. They were nearly naked, standing wet and shivering in the winter air. We wrapped them in blankets, we checked their nose hairs to see if they were singed, we wiped their faces with sterile water, and irrigated their eyes, which were inflamed from the smoke. We gave them oxygen and transported them quickly to the hospital—two in our ambulance, two in the ambulance from another town. By the time we returned to the scene it was almost daybreak, but the fire was still raging. The house had crumbled in sections; the outer rim of walls remained, but the floors and interiors were a sick black hole in the center from which smoke still billowed forth.
I looked at our firemen, we pulled some off the scene to check their vitals. One sounded asthmatic, another spit out charcoal-tinged sputum, another stood by the side of the ambulance and heaved vomit on his boots. Their faces were black with soot and sweat, and their fire jackets smelled like toast.
It took until noon Thanksgiving Day for the fire to be under control. There was nothing left of the house, it had burned to the ground. The four people had been given clothing to wear at the hospital and were told repeatedly how lucky they had been not to get killed.
The local paper ran a big story about the fire, and how it was started by a single candle that was not extinguished before the family went to bed. The paper showed the remains of the house, a heap of rubble behind a yellow police rope. There were the usual snapshots of the firemen, which looked like pictures of firemen you have seen a hundred times, guys with hoses spraying water on the flames. The reality of the scene didn’t translate correctly to newsprint.
I took a souvenir of that fire back home with me. Jumping out of the back of the ambulance onto the asphalt road, I landed so hard I broke three bones in my right foot. My adrenaline was so high it took me until the next day to know I was injured. A bone scan at the hospital confirmed the fractures. I was given a clumsy orthopedic boot to wear and told to stay off my feet. The boot lasted six hours until I unstrapped the Velcro fasteners and threw it to the back of the closet. I took a lot of Motrin and developed an interesting hobble that slowed me down. People were respectful when I gimped toward the ambulance with my “war wound.” It took a full year before I could walk without pain. But I would rather limp around on a broken foot than spend five minutes fighting a fire. It is incomprehensible how people have the bravery to do it.
13
There are nights when I hate the radio that sits by the side of the bed. It’s a special police radio that is tuned to the emergency frequency that tones me out when a 911 call comes in. It looks innocuous, like a small black box or a laptop computer, but it has the power to wrench me awake at any hour of the night.
Most firehouses work in shifts. During your shift you live at the firehouse, eat with your fellow firemen, watch TV, knit, or do whatever you can do to occupy your time between calls. Georgetown is different. There aren’t enough volunteers to fill a shift roster, so the alternative is a simple one; everyone is on duty all the time. As long as I am near my pager or the radio in my upstairs bedroom, or the two-way radio in the car, I can be called out.
Before I go to bed I stare at the radio and try to psyche it out, challenging it to let me sleep through the night instead of rudely pulling me awake. It sits on a round glass-topped table that has a luxuriously woven blue and white tablecloth I bought in Provence. Also on the table is a crystal and sterling silver shaker filled with talc that scents the bedsheets, and a pile of art books because I love to look at Pre-Raphaelite paintings of beautiful ivory-skinned women with flowing red hair before I go to bed. There is also an amethyst glass Victorian dish shaped like a lady’s hand that holds a Catholic holy medal, given to me by a friend. All this is on my side of the bed, not Michael’s side. It is my altar to calmness and femininity, to lovely gentle thoughts and shelter by a kind God. And then there is the radio.
I climb into bed, which has a fluffy duvet and thick square pillows in ruffled shams. In the winter there are flannel sheets, in the summer crisp white eyelet percale. The window is cracked open, I can hear an owl hooting outside. My house is on the top of a hill and my bedroom window is eye level with the tops of the tall trees, which creates a mystical floating effect when it’s dark and the moonlight plays off the branches.
I settle into bed, but I am not calm. I may be exhausted but I am not calm. I am weary, weary of the box sounding the two long notes followed by the five short beeps that means I have to get up and get dressed and run out the door.
It takes me a while to forget about the box; sometimes I say a prayer asking that I can sleep through the night.
Some people can wake up fast. I am not one of them. When I wake up I feel older and more fragile than I do during the day. My hands shake, I always have to pee, my knees hurt, my mouth is dry. I have to locate my glasses, my watch, and my EMT jumpsuit that I lay out on a chair by the bed. Going on a call in the middle of the night is especially tricky. It is hard to know how to dress properly. Say there is an automobile accident involving an elderly person. It is winter and you might be standing out in the road for an hour or more while the person is extricated from the car. During this time you will freeze if you are not wearing layers of clothes, heavy shoes, socks, a hat, gloves, the works. But in the back of the ambulance the heat is on, and because the elderly are always cold and this one is in shock, you crank it up. As your patient is starting to feel comfortable, you are peeling off your winter wear, desperate to cool off. The back of the rig is often littered with clothes.
The worst calls are on bitter winter nights, cold stone gray ones with a freezing sheet of drizzle outside. Connecticut has a lot of these. I am in bed, in the flannel sheets, submerged up to my neck in blankets and teddy bears and sweet-smelling down pillows. The tone goes off. I bolt upright, and switch on the light to see the pad and pencil I keep next to the bed so I can scribble down the location of the call. Michael wakes up, too, groans, and buries his head under his pillow. “Turn it down,” he bellows, even though I have the radio on the lowest setting. I turn off the light and try to get dressed in the dark. Michael is a very light sleeper and once he has been woken up he can’t get back to sleep. At 2:30 in the morning he will trudge downstairs to make a cup of coffee as I am rushing out the door. He gives me a long-suffering look, as I mumble apologies.
I have developed tricks to make the night calls more palatable. I always grab a hit of orange juice from the fridge on the way out, so I can pump up my blood sugar. I keep my car as neat and well stocked as the ambulance so I can easily locate my rubber gloves, masks, and goggles in the dark. And then of course there are the CDs that make the transition from bed to car bearable.
I have a special collection of EMT CDs. I have chosen kick-ass Southern rock and roll for speeding along a dark road with a flashing blue light on. Black Oak Arkansas’s rendition of “Jim Dandy” sets my heart pumping. Old doo-wop is great too: I sing “Rama Lama Ding Dong” as I fly around the curves. But then if I want to wallow in the whole blue muck of sickness there is Van Morrison’s rendition of “TB Sheets,” which gets me ready for the deathly rot that waits at the end of the driveway I’m about to pull into.
Not all night calls are bad. On a summer night it can be fun to cruise back from the hospital at 2 A.M. with the windows of the ambulance open. The breeze ruffles our light EMT windbreakers as the ambulance crew walks into McDonald’s or Dunkin’ Donuts with our two-way radios blathering and our stethoscopes sticking out of our pockets. The perfect sameness of fast food places is soothing. I used to think it was ghoulish to eat after a call, but now I know how much energy a call takes out of us, and this is our refueling stop. I love the cop-EMT lingo (Dunkin’ Donuts is “double delta”) and I love having to choose between twenty different doughnuts that all taste the same but have spangles and swirls of different-colored frostings on them.
On nights like this I go back to bed slowly, lie on top of the sheets, and think of how happy I am not to be in the hospital, to be in my own house where it smells nice and the white crisp curtains flutter on the window.
At Georgetown we are issued EMT jackets when we join. About six months after I joined the fire department, the old jackets were supplemented with state-of-the-art new jackets that form a pathogen barrier between the wearer and any icky stuff coming from a patient. The jackets are expensive; the firehouse paid around $400 apiece for them. They are rubbery on the outside and the inside has a thick thermal liner. I am beyond excitement when I get my new jacket from Bernice, but after wearing it for a few days I revert to my old limp rag of a jacket. It takes only a short time for me to realize the new jackets are hell for menopausal women like me, veritable sweatboxes with arms and a hood. They let no pathogens in, but they also let no air in, and with each hot flash I feel like I am suffocating. Dot has also gotten herself into a snit about the new jackets. It is a man’s size, and the arms hang down to her knees. She complains to Bernice about the jacket, and Bernice throws up her hands. She tells Dot that she can’t order anything with shorter arms, Dot does not want to pay for alterations, and the sweat-inducing expensive blue thing is flung back and forth between them like a hot potato.
Of course, one of the great things about Georgetown is how lax the dress code is. We are encouraged to wear the new blue jackets to look professional and keep ourselves safe from germs, but what we wear under them is what we happen to be wearing at the time of the call. I have answered calls in the flamenco costume I wear to my weekly dance class, and in a velvet evening dress and good jewelry. I have answered many calls in my pajamas, over which I have thrown a jumpsuit.
Sartorially, the strangest calls are the ones that take place on Halloween, the night of the Volunteer Fire Department’s annual Haunted House. This event is pure Georgetown, homespun to the hilt. The point of the haunted house is to scare the local kids and then give them a bag of candy. There are other haunted houses in the area, some of them genuinely scary with big budgets for special effects and illusions of smoke and mirrors. About seven miles from Georgetown there is one run by a local produce market that is so intense that grown-ups have been known to faint while inside. It features lifelike “lunatics” who run after you in the dark with chainsaws.
Our haunted house is held in one of the fire engine bays. We cordon off the area with black-painted plywood panels and curtains made of sheets of heavy black plastic. The scariest thing about our haunted house is walking through the door into semidarkness, but what you see, once inside, is pretty tame.
The first thing you will see is Nancy Davis, a pretty blond EMT with a pert nose, dressed as a witch. Even with a fake wart glued to her green-painted skin, she still looks like a preppy cheerleader. Then you get to Bernice and me. Her specialty is to dress as a mummy. I spend half an hour with her before the haunted house wrapping her in gauze bandages, then we throw some fake blood on for effect.
My costumes are more conceptual. One year I was a dead Viking, with a face painted gray-blue and a Viking helmet complete with horns. I looked more like a sickly Wagnerian opera singer than a spook. The next year I was a pumpkin-faced spider woman decked out in orange face paint and a black beret with a huge hairy fake spider sewed on the top. Neither Bernice or I look the slightest bit scary. Bernice, the former model, looks hopelessly chic even dressed as a bloody mummy.
Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. My birthday falls a few days before it, and as a child I always had an orange- and black-frosted birthday cake. What I liked about Halloween was that it was one day out of the year when everyone was supposed to be afraid. It made me feel like I had lots of company. The dark cloud of fear under which I lived, filled with ghosts of parental misdeeds, divorces, and loneliness, was mirrored back at me by images of skeletons and gravestones and monsters coming out of their graves. On October 31, the whole world jumped at the sound of footsteps on the staircase, and a thumping heart was the norm.
Bernice and I stand together and for four hours go “woooooooo” or “boooooooo” as people walk by us, and we move our hands like talons to try to look scary. We chase little kids around and really turn on the juice for smug teenagers who come in and make us feel like middle-aged soccer moms in cheap costumes. What is in the back of our minds is that if a 911 call comes in we must abandon our post at the haunted house. We will rip off as much of our costumes as we can, but it is more than possible that we will still have semipainted faces or be covered in fake blood. We always hope that we will not get a psychiatric patient that night who will see monsters jumping out the back of the ambulance to get him.
I find it comforting that the Georgetown Haunted House is so low-tech. I wouldn’t admit this to Bernice, but I would be too scared to go into a haunted house that I had not seen constructed from scratch. I have to know where the exits are and what lies around each corner. Knowledge replaces terror for me, and instead of being afraid I can now safely watch one of the Heibeck brothers’ young sons lying on a table, covered with raw chicken livers, screaming as if he is having live surgery performed on him. I love seeing our shy and modest chief walking around as the straw man from
The Wizard
of Oz,
giving candy to little kids. I love hearing the very tidy and sanitation-conscious Bernice complain that the tub we have set out for the tiny tots to bob for apples is hideously unsanitary—“a real pathogen menace,” she concludes.
Maybe most of all I love watching Mark Svenson, one of our firemen-EMTs, and the assistant chief of the department, dressed as a magician and doing card tricks and waving his magic wand for the little kids in the adjoining room where they bob for apples. Mark is gentle, kind, and brave, a family man with children of his own. Mark is also battling a life-threatening illness that slowly disables him despite chemotherapy and other heavy curatives. This is scarier than any illusion in any haunted house. I want Mark to wave his wand and make his disease go away. The kids giggle as he swoops his black shiny cape and tips his top hat at them. Tonight magic rules. Fake blood is easier to control than the real stuff. We are masters of what is scary within the walls of the haunted house. We can start it and we can stop it, unlike out there, when the tone goes off and real life takes hold.