Chapter 3 - THE AMBULANCE RIDE
I remember pieces of the ambulance.
Not a complete sequence.
A mask over my face.
The paramedic asking me not to talk unless I needed to.
Daniel standing outside our house looking terrified.
Caleb trying to follow until someone stopped him.
My mother climbing into the front.
Then the female paramedic asking me something strange.
“Emma, any recent travel?”
I shook my head.
“Any surgeries?”
No.
“Any medications?”
I tried to answer.
She leaned closer.
“What?”
“Birth control.”
“What kind?”
I told her the name.
She looked at her partner.
That look frightened me.
Then she asked, “Any leg pain lately?”
My right calf had hurt for almost a week.
I thought I had pulled something at work.
“Yes.”
“Which leg?”
I pointed.
The paramedic’s face stayed calm.
But her voice became more focused.
“Okay. Don’t move around any more than you need to.”
I wanted to ask why.
I could not get enough air.
At the hospital, everything accelerated.
People surrounded me.
Questions.
Blood tests.
Imaging.
An IV.
Someone telling Mom to wait outside.
Then a doctor saying a word I had only heard on television.
Clots.
Several of them had traveled into my lungs.
Pulmonary emboli.
One was large enough that my blood oxygen had fallen dangerously low by the time paramedics reached me.
The doctor said we were fortunate the ambulance arrived when it did.
Fortunate.
I lay there with oxygen against my face and thought about standing in the kitchen while Uncle Ray laughed.
May you like
I had been close enough to something catastrophic for doctors to use the word fortunate because I had not died.
And the person I trusted most had told me I was pretending.
