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 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, 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.
