Not all that many years ago, a woman collapsed on the floor of a restaurant where she and my wife were working. Although in great pain and perhaps in danger of dying, she begged her friends to not call an ambulance. Like so many Americans, she knew she couldn’t pay for it.

You have probably read that even people who can afford it are not calling ambulances as often as they once did. Because of the virus, some older people who have not left their homes in weeks fear that a visit to the emergency room might be a death sentence. So it wasn’t until I broke out in a sweat and had a very upset stomach, along with pains too numerous and insignificant to mention, that I called my friend who knows about these things. I simply asked him if his ambulance crew could come up and give me an EKG.

All I know about the EKG is that it is something that they always do. A while back I happened to be on deck when my friend set his truck on fire. There were high times there for a while, and when the fire department had things under control they gave me an EKG because I’d been excited. It is something they always do.

When the technicians finished with me in my back room, they all strongly suggested that I be carted off to the ER. It seems that the EKG really doesn’t mean a thing without an X-ray and a urine sample.

The woman in charge was from Machias. You don’t want to mess with them, so I went.

On the way to the hospital she said that when she was an infant they didn’t have day care in Machias, so her father put her in a crib in the stern when he went hauling. She said that’s why she has no trouble walking around in a moving ambulance today.

I made note of it.

While riding in the back of an ambulance you think of a lot of things. I attended a Laughter for Health conference near Pensacola and we had just come out of a session. I was standing in the lobby with my elbows on a high, round table, when an attractive young woman approached and took me by the hand.

This was something I had never experienced. Even 50 years before, girls did not approach me, let alone clasp my hand.

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I’m a hospice nurse. I hold old men’s hands when they die.”

We got to the hospital and they squirted my forehead with a ray gun on the way in, just like you see on TV. Now, when the topic comes up, I can sit back, smirk knowingly at my friends and say, “Been there – done that.”

When you go to the emergency room you want to find out as much as you can about the people who are helping you. When one masked man told me who he was, I was able to tell him that in 1955 his aunt was the prettiest girl in Rockland. I used to see her at the roller skating rink. She was only 14 at the time and too young for me. He says that she’s 80 and available now.

The heart doctor said he lives down the road and that he had my rhubarb in pie for supper.

I asked one of the smart young men who helped me if he wasn’t often tempted to say, “Stop whining, old man. You’re wearing out. Learn to live with it.” He laughed – and had to admit that that was what he was often thinking.

Upon reading of my adventures in the ER, one of my Facebook friends wrote, “Like so many of us, you are navigating through a challenging and changing world in a body that was built so long ago that the repair parts are not available.”

My trip to the hospital reminded me of a story I used to tell about my old next-door neighbor Gramp Wiley: When Gramp read in the newspaper that our friend Blinky just got a job working on the ambulance, he pounded his fist on the arm of his rocker and shouted, “Blinky can’t work on that ambulance. Blinky is stupid. He gets everything back-end-to. It would be just my luck to have Blinky show up in that ambulance at 2 o’clock some morning when I’m lying here on the kitchen floor, needing a tube shoved down my throat.”

The humble Farmer can be heard Friday nights at 7 on WHPW (97.3 FM) and visited at:

www.thehumblefarmer.com/MainePrivateRadio.html

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