Ambulance Girl

How I Saved Myself By Becoming an EMT

Jane Stern

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Paperback

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QTY:

English

Three Rivers Press
15 July 2004

Biography: general

Readers of personal narratives about women in medicine, like Perri Klass and Lisa Belkin; people interested in stories from the emergency room, like Marc Brown's Emergency!; and anyone who loves a tough, sassy woman's true story of her own second act, like Fran Drescher's Cancer, Schmancer.

The basis for the movie starring Kathy Bates, Ambulance Girl is an inspiring

story by a woman who found,

somewhat late in life, that ""in helping others I learned

to help

myself.""

Jane Stern was a walking encyclopedia of panic attacks, depression,

and hypochondria. Her marriage of more than thirty years was suffering, and she was

virtually immobilized by fear and anxiety. As the daughter of parents who both died

before she was thirty, Stern was terrified of illness and death, and despite the

fact that her acclaimed career as a food and travel writer required her to spend

a great deal of time on airplanes, she suffered from a persistent fear of flying

and severe claustrophobia. Yet, this fifty-two-year-old writer decided to become an emergency medical

technician.

Stern tells her story

with great humor and poignancy, creating a wonderful portrait of a middle-aged, Woody

Allen-ish woman who was ""deeply and neurotically terrified of sick and dead people,""

but who went out into the world to save other people's lives as a way of saving her

own. Her story begins with the boot camp of EMT training- 140 hours at the hands

of a dour ex-marine who took delight in presenting a veritable parade of amputations,

hideous deformities, and gross disasters. Jane-overweight and badly out of shape-had

to surmount physical challenges like carrying a 250-pound man seated in a chair down

a dark flight of stairs. After class she did rounds in the emergency room of a local

hospital.

Each call Stern describes is a vignette

of human nature, often with a life in the balance. From an AIDS hospice to town drunks,

yuppie wife beaters to psychopaths, Jane comes to see the true nature and underlying

mysteries of a town she had called home for twenty years. Throughout the book we

follow her as she gets her sea legs, bonds with the firefighters

who become her colleagues, and eventually, comes to be known as Ambulance Girl.

By: Jane Stern
Imprint: Three Rivers Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 202mm, Width: 134mm, Spine: 14mm
Weight: 202g
ISBN: 9781400048694
ISBN 10: 1400048699
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 15 July 2004
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

JANE STERN was a contributing editor and columnist at Gourmet. She is the author, with Michael Stern, of more than twenty books, including Roadfood, and a winner of the James Beard Award for Lifetime Achievement. The Sterns are regular contributors to National Public Radio's The Splendid Table. She lives in West Redding, Connecticut.