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Authors: Jane Stern
Tags: Fiction
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like Sven. I can’t even walk down a fucking flight of stairs without holding on. What good am I? What a waste of time this whole thing is.
The next day I call Melanie Barnard, a friend who is an EMT in New Canaan. She is small-framed and not all that young. I tell her my trauma with Sven. “Big deal,” she says. “That’s what the cops and firemen are for—to help you lift people.” I am cheered: big, young, strong men, at my command. Suddenly I feel better.
At our next class I know I have to face Frank. Not only was I unable to carry Sven but I did not “see him after class” as I was told. Before class begins I summon up the courage to confront Frank with my FAIL. It doesn’t seem to be as make or break as I thought it was. He looks at me somewhat sympathetically and says, “Do some weight training.” It is not the end of the world. I buy a treadmill and do an hour a day on it while I watch
Trauma Center
on the Learning Channel to toughen me up to the gore factor.
Pretty soon my postclass routine of going home, having a bagel, and watching old movies on TV has changed. I am now watching the Tape. The Tape costs $49.00 and is ordered through the mail from a medical book publishing company. The title is blunt:
Pass
EMT-B.
We are now halfway through the class, we have about eighty hours of classroom work behind us and a dozen tests.
At the beginning of the last class Frank has brought up the subject of the national boards. We will have to pass this grueling two-day exam to become EMTs. The boards are given after all classroom work is done, after we have interned at a local hospital ER, and after we have passed Frank’s finals. We then drive an hour and a half away to a vocational school in the boondocks of central Connecticut, where we are given the two-day exam. Frank tells us the odds of us passing it are 50/50. He tells us that many of the people we will see there will have already failed the test once or twice and are trying yet again. He tells us that the trick to passing is to memorize every word he has said and every word in our textbooks and then to get a copy of the
Pass EMT-B
tape and learn it by heart.
I order it on Amazon.com the minute I get home from class. I pay extra for overnight shipping although the test is still months away. Dot, who is extremely thrifty, immediately starts asking me who we can borrow a copy of the tape from. Deceitfully I do not tell her I have a copy. I want it all for myself. At least for now.
On my home treadmill, I put the tape in the video machine hooked up to the TV in front of the treadmill.
Pass
EMT-B
is a six-part play, the star of which is a tidy young woman with a Dorothy Hamill haircut who progresses through all six practical scenarios of the national boards.
Needless to say, she does everything perfectly. She is to be our role model if we want to pass. I hate her. I hate her robotic delivery and the way she looks so humorless. I hate how her polyester uniform pants do not make her ass look fat. I hate that I have to act just like her in order to pass the test. I watch the tape twice a day every day. I watch her hook semiautomatic defibrillators up to real people pretending to be patients. Frank tells us that our patients will be National Guard recruits, and that we are not to talk to them before, during, or after the test. To do so is an automatic fail, Frank says.
When I am not watching the tape I am sitting in class. Tonight’s class is about head injuries, and I am thinking about the fact that my father had a steel plate in his skull and how it made him go into uncontrollable rages. I don’t know much about how he was injured so badly, except some hastily explained story about how he was playing near the trolley tracks in Harlem when he was eight years old.
As I child I never questioned the story or wanted to know more. My father was a very private man, and plagued by mental problems. When we sat together at Saturday-afternoon matinees at the Loews
The next day I call Melanie Barnard, a friend who is an EMT in New Canaan. She is small-framed and not all that young. I tell her my trauma with Sven. “Big deal,” she says. “That’s what the cops and firemen are for—to help you lift people.” I am cheered: big, young, strong men, at my command. Suddenly I feel better.
At our next class I know I have to face Frank. Not only was I unable to carry Sven but I did not “see him after class” as I was told. Before class begins I summon up the courage to confront Frank with my FAIL. It doesn’t seem to be as make or break as I thought it was. He looks at me somewhat sympathetically and says, “Do some weight training.” It is not the end of the world. I buy a treadmill and do an hour a day on it while I watch
Trauma Center
on the Learning Channel to toughen me up to the gore factor.
Pretty soon my postclass routine of going home, having a bagel, and watching old movies on TV has changed. I am now watching the Tape. The Tape costs $49.00 and is ordered through the mail from a medical book publishing company. The title is blunt:
Pass
EMT-B.
We are now halfway through the class, we have about eighty hours of classroom work behind us and a dozen tests.
At the beginning of the last class Frank has brought up the subject of the national boards. We will have to pass this grueling two-day exam to become EMTs. The boards are given after all classroom work is done, after we have interned at a local hospital ER, and after we have passed Frank’s finals. We then drive an hour and a half away to a vocational school in the boondocks of central Connecticut, where we are given the two-day exam. Frank tells us the odds of us passing it are 50/50. He tells us that many of the people we will see there will have already failed the test once or twice and are trying yet again. He tells us that the trick to passing is to memorize every word he has said and every word in our textbooks and then to get a copy of the
Pass EMT-B
tape and learn it by heart.
I order it on Amazon.com the minute I get home from class. I pay extra for overnight shipping although the test is still months away. Dot, who is extremely thrifty, immediately starts asking me who we can borrow a copy of the tape from. Deceitfully I do not tell her I have a copy. I want it all for myself. At least for now.
On my home treadmill, I put the tape in the video machine hooked up to the TV in front of the treadmill.
Pass
EMT-B
is a six-part play, the star of which is a tidy young woman with a Dorothy Hamill haircut who progresses through all six practical scenarios of the national boards.
Needless to say, she does everything perfectly. She is to be our role model if we want to pass. I hate her. I hate her robotic delivery and the way she looks so humorless. I hate how her polyester uniform pants do not make her ass look fat. I hate that I have to act just like her in order to pass the test. I watch the tape twice a day every day. I watch her hook semiautomatic defibrillators up to real people pretending to be patients. Frank tells us that our patients will be National Guard recruits, and that we are not to talk to them before, during, or after the test. To do so is an automatic fail, Frank says.
When I am not watching the tape I am sitting in class. Tonight’s class is about head injuries, and I am thinking about the fact that my father had a steel plate in his skull and how it made him go into uncontrollable rages. I don’t know much about how he was injured so badly, except some hastily explained story about how he was playing near the trolley tracks in Harlem when he was eight years old.
As I child I never questioned the story or wanted to know more. My father was a very private man, and plagued by mental problems. When we sat together at Saturday-afternoon matinees at the Loews
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