It's an emergency! Take your time!

My children think I’m an old fogey and I don’t help much when I tell them stories of moving to and living in a one-horse town in the 70s, which to them might as well be the post-civil-war era.  

Today I don’t know Happy and I got on the subject of ambulances and hospital stays.  Oh, yes I do.  That’s another story.  In the course of our conversation we got talking about people in the rural part of Oklahoma getting to the hospital in emergency situations when there was no ambulance.   That brought up my childhood Glencoe ambulance story.  

We lived in a small farm house about ½ mile east of Highway 51. So we weren’t out in the middle of nowhere and once you got on the highway “town” was only about a mile further south.  Town wasn’t very large.  I don’t remember what the population of Glencoe is or was at that time, but I do know that the entire student body K-12 was the equivalent of  the population of just one grade in the Philadelphia school I moved from.  

For this particular episode we had a family staying with us.  If my memory serves me correctly the family of 4 was moving to Oklahoma from California, and for some reason I think he and my dad hit it off and that’s how they happened to be bunking with us until they found a place to stay.  That’s a family of six (ours) and a family of four (theirs) living in a two-bedroom house with a closed in porch and a small room off of it.  They must have brought a camper or something.  Or there were a lot of kids sleeping on floors.  I don’t remember.

At any rate, it just so happened that his wife J coughed I think, and her back went out.  Out, out, out.  She couldn’t move.  Couldn’t bend, couldn’t get up, didn’t want to be moved.  She’s flat on her back on the couch in our living room where it seemed destined she would stay until “someone” did “something” because after several hours, pain meds and maybe a heating pad or two, things didn’t get any better and she was obviously in pain. The men tossed about a few different ideas but were afraid to lift her for fear of doing more damage, and then they weren’t sure that even if they did succeed in lifting her, they could get her in a car comfortably for the 30 minute ride to the hospital in Stillwater.  

So Dad did what a normal person might do.  He got out the phone book for Glencoe, picked up our trusty phone on the trusty party-line and dialed the emergency number listed in the book.  

I’m not sure who answered the phone.  But whoever it was didn’t have a key to the “ambulance.”  They thought maybe the chief of police did and gave Dad his number.  He didn’t have it and thought the fire chief might, and gave Dad his number.  

My dad isn’t the most patient of men.  I think he told the fire chief to do the calling around and get back with him one way or another about whether or not the ambulance would even function.  It was becoming obvious it hadn’t been used in a long time.  

Finally someone called us back.  The Postmaster had the key.  Logical.  If he’d mailed it out, things might have gone a little faster than they did.  Thankfully this wasn’t a real emergency.  From everyone’s point of view except J’s, I’m sure.  

I don’t remember anything beyond that.  I just remember being absolutely dumbfounded that one would have to search for the keys to an “ambulance.”  I think the ambulance consisted of a station wagon, a stretcher and a light you slapped on the roof above the driver’s side, but I could be wrong on that.  I don’t remember getting her out of the house and I don’t remember anything about her diagnosis or treatment other than the fact that I know she was soon up and walking around. That wasn’t the end of our adventures with the A family either.  

That’s just one more incident that makes my oldest roll his eyes and ask me if I ever had a life.  In actuality, it’s been quite a life.  So his stories are about chasing after the bus that had left him behind in Paris and getting lost in the Olympic stadium in Sydney.  My stories are just about getting lost in the fray a little closer to home.  But they are mine.