Fed Up - By Jessica Conant-Park & Susan Conant Page 0,17
clearly.
I don’t know whether the EMT responded to me, to someone else, or to the whole situation, but I clearly remember that he said, “Okay, let’s get you all to the emergency room.” I also remember that he let Nelson have it: “And turn off that camera!”
Until then, I’d all but forgotten Nelson’s existence. Wishful thinking?
“Man, look at it this way,” Nelson said. “I’m just doing my job. Pursuing my art, okay? I’m a filmmaker, and I’m not going to miss this. That’s what a documentary is about, right? Reality. Whatever happens. No matter what, you get it on film.” The glee in Nelson’s voice made me feel queasier than ever.
The cop was more effective than the EMT had been in getting Nelson to quit filming. Instead of giving Nelson an order, he did nothing but look at him, raise a hand, point his finger, and utter one word: “You!”
Nelson turned tail and vanished through the dining room.
The next thing that happened was that I stood up and . . . and . . . Well, what I definitely did not do was faint. For one thing, as a person who had completed a whole year of social work school and was thus a mental-health professional in training, I couldn’t possibly have passed out from anxiety. For another thing, although I’d been feeling sick to my stomach, I hadn’t lost any bodily fluids and thus couldn’t have keeled over from dehydration. And for yet another thing, I wasn’t the swooning type. So, let’s just say that one moment I was rising from a chair in the kitchen, and the next moment, the next one I can remember, anyway, I was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. But not, not, not because I had fainted.
SIX
OKAY, so I fainted. The first voice I heard when I came to was Marlee’s. “I can’t see right,” she complained. “Everything is kind of blurry.”
The second voice belonged to the handsome EMT. “You with us again, Chloe? You’re going to be fine. We’re on our way to the hospital, but all that happened to you was that you fainted.”
It was then that I became aware of the siren and of the sensation of being in a moving vehicle. To my credit, I didn’t ask where I was. In fact, although the interior of the big emergency medical service vehicle looked like my idea of the inside of a space capsule, I knew that I was in an ambulance. “Not me!” I said. “I never faint.”
Besides his good looks, the EMT had a sense of humor. He laughed. “Not the type for smelling salts, huh?”
When I tried to sit up, he gently told me to keep my head down for a while, but I succeeded in looking around and saw Marlee on the opposite side of the ambulance. She was rubbing her eyes, and her face looked wet from tears. “What’s wrong with me?” she asked in a feeble voice. “With us?”
Although she wasn’t addressing me, I answered her. “Something in the house? Like a gas leak?”
To my surprise, it was Josh who replied. His voice came from somewhere toward the front of the ambulance. “It’s got to be the food. I don’t know how, but it has to.” He started reciting a list of everything he’d bought today: “Lamb, halibut, olives, arugula, potatoes . . .”
The comforting rumble of Josh’s voice must have soothed me. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I showed two signs of health: practicality and hunger. “I don’t have my insurance card!” I said in alarm. “It’s in my purse, locked in my car.” I had the sense to say nothing about my empty stomach. With one person dead and others ill, this was no time to ask for a snack. Even so, the thought did cross my mind that the hospital probably had a cafeteria or at least a vending machine.
As it turned out, Josh had found my keys and retrieved my purse from my car. Although he grumbled in a sweet way about women and their purses, I was glad to have my belongings with me, especially once we were at the emergency room, which was mercifully uncrowded. By the time we arrived, even my matinee-idol EMT conceded that my case had low priority, as did the nurses responsible for deciding which of us had to be seen immediately and which of us could wait. Although I still felt shaken, I had no physical symptoms