so much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away
I get so tired of working so hard for our survival
I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive
All EMTs pull at least one shift at the emergency room of St. Peter’s hospital in
Especially hot nurses.
And St. Pete’s, despite its holy name, has two varieties of these vile temptresses. One is sweet Caroline (dun-dun-dun, Good times never felt so goooood…), all 24 years of her, fake tan, frosted hair, heavy on the eye-shadow, but still, really, really pretty.
The other is Fire Woman (Smoke she is a rising fire, YEAH!!!!), also very pretty, but mean pretty. I’m gonna hurt you pretty. Don’t you look at me or I’ll squash your tea-bags pretty.
I had heard of both from the other EMTs, but you know how these things get exaggerated through the grapevine, especially EMTs, who are habitual liars, suffering from the inferiority of not being paramedics and yet still allowed to drive a $100,000 ambulance. (We can even run the lights and sirens if we want. And we want. A lot.)
So I really expected that Caroline (I've been inclined to believe it never would…) would be fake, frosted and shadowed, but not pretty. And I imagined Fire Woman (Oh, smoke on the horizon…) really wouldn’t be as evil as she was made out to be.
Well, my own experience proved that the truth lies somewhere in between, because the truth is a lier.
In fact, Caroline (We fill it up with only two, oh...) really is pretty. She does have frosted hair, sure, but in a classy way, if frosted hair can be called that, and on the right woman it can. She does have a liberal amount of eye-shadow, but there’s a reason so many baby seals have been clubbed and bunny rabbits blinded by the cosmetic industry in the last century. It works. And she actually talks to me! Which completely freaks me out, and all I can think to do is repeat Lloyd’s Gas’n’Sip monologue from Say Anything. But she’s never seen Say Anything, and this makes me want to hold her and make it better and repeat all the lines to the movie until the hurt goes away.
And then I meet Fire Woman. Wow, she’s pretty, too. And closer to my age. She’s coming over to squash my tea-bags, though, if what I’ve heard from the other EMTs is true.
“Are you the student?”
Every leaf in my tea-bags is begging me to say 'No' and start asking directions to the cafeteria in Spanish, but instead, I say,
“Uh, yes.”
Fire Woman smiles at me. And it melts my heart, in the way only a truly evil smile can, but I think, well, maybe she’s not that bad.
“Can you help me with something,” she asks nicely.
And though I don’t want to leave Caroline and her batty eye-lashes, I also don’t want Fire Woman to leave me.
(My dad once explained why the ducklings follow him around after they hatch, instead of their own mothers, and he was all educational and shit, like, ‘Imprinting, boy. It’s called imprinting.’ And I chewed on that for awhile, and instead of learning the lesson, I thought to myself, ‘Dude, it’s pretty fucking weird that all you do is walk around your land all day with a bunch of damn geese following you around like the Lord of the Flies.’)
But suddenly I felt like one of those ducklings, I knew what their longing was, I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS*. I eagerly followed Fire Woman, and would follow her till the ends of the earth.
(*I totally do not know why the caged bird sings)
We approach a room unlike the other hospital rooms. This one doesn’t have curtains for walls, but real walls and a real door. Inside, there is a single hospital bed and a man lay upon that bed and he looked sleepy and not much older than me. And inside this room, Fire Woman (Oh, smokestack lightning...) turns to me and hands me a cup and a pair of latex gloves, and I’m all like thinking, ‘But there’s a dude here, what if he wakes up and sees?’ but honestly, I’m an imprinted duckling, and I would do whatever she asked, clucking and quacking and losing feathers the whole time.
She asks, "Will you please get a urine sample from this patient?"
And in a deep, husky voice, I say, "I will."
Fire Woman (My heart’s a ball of burnin’ flame…) then abruptly leaves the room and closes the door behind her, and this is weird, because there should be no reason either for her to leave or for her to close the door. This is a hospital, after all, and there is not supposed to be any privacy, just a bunch of humiliated sick people with their parts on display.
And I turn to the sleepy man, who’s roughly my age and he says something that only the wolves would understand for these aren’t actual words he’s speaking but primal grunts and low frequencies. He looks at me, and I say, "I need you to give me a urine sample."
And he makes another low frequency noise that brings water to my eyes and when he lifts his right hand, I see that it is handcuffed to the bed railing, and so I turn to his left to hand him the cup and I see that this hand, too, is handcuffed to the bed railing, and in an innocent, meek voice I say very quietly to myself, "But Fire Woman, did you not know this man is handcuffed? How can he give me a urine sample, Fire Woman?"
And then I remember her words explicitly, and they are, "Will you please GET a urine sample from this patient?” and it’s at this point in the story that I do moaning and notice a funny smell and I don’t remember what happened next.
Fire Woman (Fire Woman, you’re to blame!) smiled at me when I gave her the cup filled with urine, and I half expected her to either drink it or toss it in my face, how wicked she was.
I go to find Caroline (How can I hurt when holding you?) and share this horror with her, but she is gone, replaced by a male nurse named LeRoy (Baddest man in the whole damn town…) and he has seen Say Anything and he repeats all of Lloyd’s lines to me and wants me to play the ‘role’ of Ione Skye, and that’s when I truly understood what all those people mean when they say our health care system is broke. Because it is broke ass.
Sweet Caroline, Neil Diamond
Fire Woman, The Cult
Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, Jim Croce
In Your Eyes, Peter Gabriel
Tea-Bagging references courtesy of KimDog
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