question. If you have a second,” I say to Alan one night.
Alan nods as he tucks his books into his backpack. He’s the training officer for a local fire department, and teaching is his second job. The minute class is over, he just wants to go home. I inch to the left a few feet—if he’s going to slip out, he’ll have to run me over to do it.
“Are we behind?”
Alan hefts his bag, slips the strap over his shoulder, and starts to walk before he realizes I’m blocking his escape.
“On the material, I mean.”
He shakes his head. “Nope.”
Oh.
He tries to get around me. I shift my weight.
“Because we’re entering month three, and we haven’t done any scenarios yet. Are we supposed to be doing those?”
“We haven’t done scenarios?”
“No.”
“Yeah, we did a few right after we talked about ongoing assessments.”
“We haven’t learned those.”
“We haven’t?”
“No. Only initial assessments.”
Alan leans right, lets his bag rest on the desk. “Shit. And we’re entering month two, aren’t we?”
“Month three.”
“Month three?”
Now I’m alarmed. I feel the rattle and hum of the freight train, its horn drowning out the world.
Alan looks straight at me. “Shit.”
“You already said that.”
He does the math in his head, nods, then lifts the bag back onto his shoulder. “Wednesday,” he says. “Get here early. We have some catching up to do.”
3
Dead Mannequins
Wednesday passes in a blur. So do Friday, the following Monday, and every day after that. I take my book everywhere, reading then reciting the telltale signs and symptoms of impending death, matching each to its corresponding course of treatment. The nearly dead are never far. I am strange company in the waiting room.
This level of immersion creates an immediacy that borders on paranoia, on obsession. Am I actually learning from all these flash cards, do I need to make more, who knew there were so many ways to stop bleeding? It’s all so new, so foreign, so much like that period of childhood—first or second grade, maybe—when you’re old enough to know you’re alive and one day will die, yet young enough to still believe that a thin vein of magic runs just beneath the surface. Everything crackles with the electric charge of wonder.
We spend half of every class studying the list of life threats EMS is equipped and trained to handle. Seizures, asthma attacks, acute problems associated with congestive heart failure, fast heart rates, slow heart rates, no heart rates, orthopedic trauma, burns, penetrating wounds, low blood pressure, high blood pressure, broken femurs, broken necks, even broken minds. We sit and listen. After an hour we push the tables aside, break out the expired drugs, and get down to the serious business of saving lives.
• • •
“Hey, ma’am,” I say, nervously reciting the script to the mannequin at my feet. “What seems to be the problem today?”
“BAM! You’re dead. I just shot you in the head,” Alan crows, curling his fingers into a gun and pulling the trigger. “And your partner? He stepped on a downed power line near the ambulance. He’s sizzling. Can you smell it? I can smell it. Who else can smell it?”
Alan is a born taskmaster—imperious, impatient, demanding perfection. And no form of imperfection aggravates him more than scene safety. The safety of you and your partner, he says over and over, is paramount. “A dying patient becomes a dead patient if you’re careless, like Mr. Hazzard here. Now,” he yells, “start over. Do it right.”
I’m standing in front of the class, hands in my pockets, eyes locked on the mannequin. On a table is a blue jump bag, a huge canvas duffel carrying every piece of equipment an EMT is allowed to use. I’ll have to correctly use all of it before I can sit. Alan faces me in a chair, legs crossed. He repeats the dispatch: person down, problem unknown.
My voice always sounds weak and far off when I do these. “First thing,” I say, “is scene safety.”
“Louder,” Alan yells. “The people in back can’t hear you. If they can’t hear you in a quiet room, how will your partner hear you when the cops start shooting up your scene?”
I take a deep breath, then rattle off all the potential hazards waiting to do us harm—an active fire, speeding cars, collapsing structures, angry bystanders, angry dogs, even angry patients. I contracted leprosy during my first scenario, so I pantomime putting on gloves. Once Alan is satisfied, I shift my attention to the patient. In reality, the patient is always the same—a naked