Ambulance Girl: How I Saved Myself By Becoming an EMT

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Gourmet magazine columnist and roving foodie Jane Stern serves up a delightful account of how she transformed herself from "a raging former urban Jewish hypochondriac on the order of Woody Allen" into a functioning human being, by becoming an emergency medical technician (EMT) in her blue-collar Connecticut hometown.

A lifelong neurotic, Stern was blindsided at age 52 by crippling depression and phobias too numerous to count. Her epiphany occurred one day during a session with her beloved shrink, when she suddenly realized that the only times she was able to forget her excruciating fears were times when she was helping people. Immediately, she signed up to join her local ambulance squad and embarked on a rigorous course of training that would literally change her life.

In her wry and witty memoir, Stern regales us with unforgettable tales from the EMT trenches: stories of roller-coaster rides in the big rig, surreal encounters in the ER, and late-night stops at Dunkin' Donuts with the fellow volunteers who have become her surrogate family. She also describes how the death of a close friend sent her spiraling back into a depression that threatened to unravel her marriage of 32 years; and how the unspeakable tragedy of 9/11 irrevocably cast some much-needed perspective on her problems, real and imagined.

Hilarious, moving, and altogether engaging, Ambulance Girl tells the inspiring and life-affirming story of a fearful middle-aged woman who learned -- late in life, but not too late -- that the best way to help yourself is to help others. Anne Markowski

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Five years ago 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. But a strange thing happened one day on a plane that was grounded at the Minneapolis airport for six horrible, foodless, airless hours. A young man on a trip with his classmates suddenly became dizzy and pale because he hadn’t eaten in many hours, and there was no food left on the plane. Without thinking about it, Jane gave him the candy bar that she had in her purse. A short time later the color had returned to his cheeks, the boy was laughing again with his friends, and Jane realized that this one small act of kindness—helping another person who was suffering—had provided her with comfort and a sense of well-being.
It was shortly thereafter that this fifty-two-year-old writer decided to become an emergency medical technician, eventually coming to be known as Ambulance Girl. 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 thehands 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, where she attended to a schizophrenic kickboxer who had tried to kill his mother that morning and a stockbroker who was taken off the commuter train to Manhattan with delirium tremens so bad it killed him.
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 and finally bonds with the burly, handsome firefighters who become her colleagues. At the end, she is named the first woman officer of the department—a triumph we joyously share with her.
Ambulance Girl is an inspiring story by a woman who found, somewhat late in life, that “in helping others I learned to help myself.” It is a book to be treasured and shared.

Author Biography: JANE STERN is a contributing editor and columnist at Gourmet. She is the author, with her husband, Michael, 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. They live in West Redding, Connecticut.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

At 52, Stern, a well-known foodie-she and her husband, Michael, have coauthored some 20 books on American culture and food, including Roadfood-found herself profoundly depressed. Holed up in the couple's Connecticut home, she'd lost interest in doing much of anything. Phobias (bus riding, air travel, claustrophobia, etc.) made her isolation worse. One day, on a whim, she responded to the "volunteers wanted" notice at the local firehouse and signed up for EMT training. No one teaching "boot camp"-style classes would have tolerated a queasy (much less depressed or phobic) recruit, so she had to tough it out. Humor definitely helped. As Stern remarks, after a few classes covering major trauma, "I am no longer clinically depressed but instead am dying of everything simultaneously." Some of her class notes are funny, like her list of EMT no-nos: don't replace organs hanging from bodies, don't give CPR to a severed head, don't attempt to revive someone in a "state of advanced decomposition" and if "you have a patient whose leg or arm is partially amputated, do not pull it off to make things `neat.' " After training and certification, the real work started, and while initially it did the trick-"in helping others I learned to help myself"-the ultimate truth, that she couldn't save everyone, brought back her depression. Stern's memoir is a quirky mix of humor, self-doubt and courage. Agent, Michael I. Ruddell. (On sale June 24) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In this revealing, often wryly humorous memoir, Stern, coauthor (with husband Michael Stern) of 30 books on American food and culture and the monthly "Roadfood" columnist for Gourmet magazine, shares the life-changing experience of becoming an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT). When she found herself clinically depressed at age 53, Stern responded by signing up for an EMT class in her Connecticut hometown, driven by childhood memories of performing repetitive head transplants on her stuffed toy bears. She sweeps readers along with stories about her first EMT calls, establishing camaraderie with the mostly male fire department and EMT team, encountering her first dead patient, dealing with the emotional difficulty of handling dead children, and forging a poignant personal connection with a terminally ill AIDS patient. She also reveals how the stress of responding to calls and of constantly being on call eventually began to disrupt her marriage and caused a relapse into depression, all to vanish suddenly when she and her fellow EMTs and firefighters struggled with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and waited for the call that never came. Throughout, readers will be captivated by the author's lively writing, which genuinely conveys the significance of finding, as she helped others, the means to heal herself. Highly recommended for academic libraries supporting an emergency training curriculum and for public libraries, especially in communities with emergency services and critical incident stress management teams.-Dale Farris, Groves, TX Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews