My sister came to town yesterday. She's here for her usual two-day slamfest of meetings followed by an obscenely early-morning vanride back to the airport for the jumps home. She arrived about ten minutes before I had to leave for my second twelve-hour night shift at the rescue squad. I answered the door in my uniform, and the effect was stunning. Maybe she never saw me in my old uniform back when I was formerly an EMT; in any case, these duds are decidedly more formal and goofily "I am a member of a uniformed hierarchical public service" than those. They seem to radiate out from the oversize jolly-old-saint-nick belt, which looks like it was designed to hold up gun holsters and handcuffs and other utility-belt accoutrements. Her first response was that I looked like I should be a cop, whereupon we all had a little giggle at how long a skinny-ass dude like myself would last up against society's most wanted. I couldn't really tell if she was impressed or just amused at the sight of me -- patches, black boots and all.
On the drive up to the squad I felt like a cop: conspicuous. Like donning this uniform removes me from the realm of normal life, and I become both more and less than the self of most days. On my last trip up there, for my first night shift, I performed a completely illegal traffic maneuver and was tailed by a cop for a few blocks. Just as I was convinced I was about to get nailed, the police passed me and vanished. I wondered if they saw the patches over my arms and decided to cut me a break as a fellow member of the uniformed world. Barring some future chance conversation or afterlife cocktail party, I'll probably never know.
Unexpectedly, I wasn't much looking forward to my second night shift. On my first shift, I was dispatched on three calls of relatively low severity. They weren't a trial by fire or blood, but they felt like an initiation safely passed. Now, my real concern was about all those mysterious people who comprise my crewmates. I'm notoriously reserved and socially inept in new groups of people, and although I know there's little to do but wait and get to know them slowly, I'm not enamored of the process. I want to skip ahead one year to a time when I'll realize that I belong.
Once again, my first act on my crew was to heroically clean the upstairs men's locker room, known in the jargon as the "men's upheads." Oh, how I've missed the ability of emergency services to create jargonic phraseology for the mundane! Some of my favorite moments took place when I would radio the hospital with a report on an incoming patient.
Elyria, we are en route to your facility with a male approximately 30 years old, unrestrained passenger in an MVA. Patient is displaying decreased LOC oriented times two, lacerations to the forehead, responsive to voice. Pupils equal and reactive to light. Vitals are as follows BP 150 over palp pulse 80 respirations 16. Patient is immobilized with c-collar and backboard. Unable to determine meds or allergies. ETA 5 minutes. Any further instructions?
Emergency-type folks, if I've left anything out, it's been seven years. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but time has a habit of doing that.
My second heroic act was to clean the "women's upheads," which I was told would be my lot in life until some new recruit joins and I can upgrade my cleaning duty. The second most recent member of the crew expressed joy when informed he could now graduate to the men's and women's "downheads," which I gather are smaller or utilized by people who spray less when they pee.
This squad company has a more ambitious work ethic than my former ambulance crew: spare time from 7-11 PM is consumed by drills and frequent equipment checks. My old crew was based in a hospital ER, and so we helped hospital staff when the need arose, but a fair portion of our down time was spent in the crew room watching Rescue 911 and old episodes of Bonanza and discussing which doctors we liked and disliked. At midnight last night I was finally able to savor some of the old joie-de-rescue when I sat in the break room with some crewmates watching that old fave, Emergency! De Soto and Gage raised a generation of folks hooked on the adventure of Emergency Medical Services, much as I imagine the show ER has inspired a new cohort of emergency docs.
It might be seen as either encouraging or perverse that people who work in a sometimes-troubling field are overwhelmingly fascinated by media reflections of their job, and led to absorb fictional traumas when not confronting human suffering in their real lives.
In that vein, Susan and I recently watched Aaron Spelling's new popcult offering, Rescue 87. It features, of course, a stunning assortment of beautiful and interchangeable characters glistening their way through scenarios so predictable that you wonder why they can't just guess the ending forty-five minutes in advance. To anyone with experience in the field, the medical care they provide is laughably inept. Correct depiction of standard procedures -- and wholesale reality, for that matter -- is shelved in favor of good camera angles and heroic postures. Prominent cheekbones occur with a frequency unmatched in real life.
I don't expect more from Aaron Spelling, but this served to point out to me that what I and others like me crave is the drama of reality, not false-drama and canned heroism. The truly compelling tales are told in the scary margins of human lives. That is one of the reasons I am back at a rescue squad when I could be at home watching it on TV instead.
On the social front, I talked a little to my crewmates, but not a lot. I felt a persistent awareness of the location of my hands. They were like shy kids always wanting to hide under a table. At least these sensations are familiar to me.
I turned in about 1 AM and got almost six hours of sleep. Only when another crew was dispatched some time around 3 AM did I resurface for a moment in the unfamiliar room, surrounded by bunk beds holding the sleeping forms of these yet still-strangers.