THE NIGHT I FELL IN LOVE WTH MY AMBULANCE DRIVER
Well, it’s difficult to know where to start a story with a title like that.
It takes an entire lifetime of random events in order to culminate in something so farcical, but I don’t think I can tell my life story in the word count allotted here, so I’ll start with Thanksgiving week, 2011.
I was in a regular local hospital room, which was fairly routine for me at the time. I’d go to the emergency room, tell them I was feeling overwhelmed with anxiety, and they’d ask me if I wanted to do harm to myself or anyone else.
If you hesitate, or say yes, they can put you away for an indeterminate amount of time — until they determine it’s safe for you to go back out into the world.
I shook my head no thinking to myself, I’m here for a one-nighter, not a marriage.
And that was more or less what it amounted to for me, for a while. When I felt so pulverized with anxiety that I could barely get out of bed, I’d go there and (sometimes) get a private room — when they didn’t plunk me into the group rubber room. Either way, they’d provide three hot meals, plus TV.
When you haven’t seen TV for a while — like a year or more — it’s amazing how mesmerizing and strangely relaxing watching that dumb shit can be.
It’s also amazing how easily one gets used to being fucked up. The first couple of days in the hospital I’d be monitored for a possible stroke because my blood pressure was so high; hydrated because my liquid diet of black coffee spiked with whisky was actually dehydrating me.
I had tubes up my nose, intravenous pumps in my wrists, and patches on my arms. This had all come to seem quite normal; doesn’t everyone holiday like this?
I knew it was Thanksgiving week because on Wednesday — the day before Thanksgiving, which for some reason always falls on a Thursday — they asked me if I’d like to go home for the day and then come back.
“Are you guys closing for the holiday?”
“No.”
“Then let’s party here.”
My only living relative left was my sister. I’d once gone to an airport and waited a couple of days for a cheap one-way ticket to anywhere just to avoid having to go to her house for Thanksgiving dinner. It was that bad.
The day before I was scheduled to leave the hospital, the head nurse in the unit pulled the curtains closed around my bed, sat down in a chair right next to me, and told me she thought that if I kept living the way I was, I would be dead within a year.
After a week of being pampered, I was feeling chipper as a chipmunk. So what she was telling me didn’t resonate at all. She then sent in another nurse, a social worker, to tell me about detox centers and rehab facilities. I thought it was all quite interesting, but had nothing to do with me.
The next day, though, in the morning, I felt scared about leaving. Hospitals are not allowed to prescribe or provide anxiety medications for more than just a few days. I knew what usually happened after that — the demonic anxiety would return and I’d start self-medicating with what I could afford, cheap booze.
I asked to see the head nurse. I told her I wanted to go from here into a rehab program. She told me I’d already been officially discharged and they couldn’t readmit me just for that. I saw the social worker and she gave me some numbers to call if I needed to.
What I feared happening, did. After my meds ran out, I went back to my regular routine. Drinking in order to quell my anxiety so I could function. As unbelievable as it may sound, I managed to publish a book I wrote during this tumultuous period of my life.
I had a cell phone — a free phone with 250 minutes a month — that we affectionately call Obama phones. No one is sure if it was his idea to give phones to people who couldn’t afford them, but no one I knew could imagine anyone else in the government being so thoughtful.
I found a detox center about an hour away, in Atlantic City. There was a local bus that went there directly.
The first time I called, there weren’t any beds available. Call back tomorrow at 8 AM sharp.
So I did. Phone intake. They screen out dilettantes.
“When is that last time you had a drink?”
“I’ve got a phone in one hand, talking to you, dear, and my other hand is wrapped around a glass of whiskey.”
Pass.
It was the longest bus ride of my life. I was sure something was going to happen so that I wouldn’t get there on time to be admitted.
But it did.
It was even more pleasant than a regular hospital. A whole floor dedicated just to de-juicing the besotted.
Detox lasts four or five days. The day before I was to be discharged, a social worker visited me, and this time I was wise enough to agree to accept additional help after I left. I signed up for an intensive outpatient rehab program located near where I was living.
Even though I didn’t experience any intense withdrawal symptoms — the shakes, sweats, heart palpitations — on the day I was supposed to leave, I couldn’t walk.
“This has never happened before.”
“That does not make me feel any better about it.”
It was not a long walk back to the bus station, but I could not even walk from my bed to the bathroom without assistance.
“We’ll call and see if your medical insurance will cover an ambulance taking you home.”
To my amazement, it did.
Who shows up to take me home in an ambulance than one of the most strikingly handsome women I have ever encountered. An all-American mix of Black, white, Puerto Rican, Indian, Irish, Italian every damn thing.
And here I am, this helpless creature who can’t even walk his way out of detox. How humbling.
She raced the ambulance back to where I was living. What it took the bus more than an hour to cover, she did in about 35 minutes. And she was driving with one hand, sipping a Coke with the other, and casually chatting away with a couple of younger protégés.
My heart is screaming I Love You! I Love You! But I’m shackled onto a gurney in the back of the ambulance, like Anthony Hopkins in that sick movie about lambs, butterflies & serial killers.
When we get to my destination, just like in the movie, they hydraulically lift me from the back of the ambulance.
The ambulance driver gets right up in my face, sizes me up, looks me over -- we’d be a pretty good fit — and then stands there silently giving me a chance to make my move, if I had one.
I didn’t. I was more concerned with not embarrassing myself in front of her by falling on the way to my car. This is no way to live, I told myself.
That encounter, more than anything else, inspired me to go to rehab and get my shit together and game back on.