Ambulance Girl Read Free Page B

crashing, and everything to do with claustrophobia. To me a plane was a sealed metal tube—an MRI machine with wings. If it was moving in the direction it was supposed to be going, I was all right; but any delay caused my anxiety level to hit 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. It was dusk and I could see through the dirty little windows of the plane that we were not even near the airport anymore. The fact that the engines were turned off was a dire sign. I held my breath. I tried not to hyperventilate. I grabbed Michael’s hand; mine was cold as ice and sweaty at the same time. Michael gave me
the look
—the look that comes from thirty years of living with someone who has raging anxiety. It is a look that is both sympathetic and reassuring. It is one of the many reasons to love Michael.
    Finally the pilot clicked on the intercom. “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” he droned in that familiar flat, emotionless way (are they taught to talk that way at pilot school?) “seems like we are going to sit here for a little while. O’Hare seems to be having some traffic control problems. I will let you know when we are taking off.”
    We sat on the runway for six hours. During this time my body pumped so much adrenaline that I thought I was having a heart attack every five minutes. Michael said every soothing thing he could think of. After three hours into the delay I stretched out limply over his lap and let him stroke my head. “When are we going to move?” I whined at Michael as if he were a fortune-telling genie who held the secret answer. I got up and paced the aisles. I tried to breathe deeply, I tried not to breathe. I felt my temples throbbing and was convinced I was having a stroke.
    I reached into my purse and lapped up the powdered remains of a decade-old Valium that I had been carting around for just such an occasion. The container was so old that the doctor’s name had worn off. The flight attendants were not pleasant; obviously they were pissed off too. The pilot stopped giving us updates after the first two hours. The sun had set and I could see nothing out the plane’s windows, no lights, nothing.
    The air was stale, the lavatory toilet clogged after the second hour, there was no food on the plane since it was only supposed to be an hourlong flight.
    The Valium was useless. Michael did the best he could. He opened his wallet and showed me pictures of our pets. He tried to talk about what we would eat in Chicago when we landed. Nothing could get my attention from the fact that the plane was not moving. I died the thousand deaths of a coward before the plane finally took off.
    By the time we arrived at the hotel my nervous system was so overtaxed that I propped myself up on the reception desk like a drunk on a lamppost. Once in our room I dived under the bedcovers and fell into a dreamless sleep.
    Somehow I got through the presentation the next day, but on the return flight home our plane was again delayed two hours. I had run out of adrenaline. My body felt numb, and I felt disconnected and unreal. When I got home I called a psychiatrist that a friend had recommended. He was supposed to be good.
    Psychiatry was not new to me. It was the family business. My uncles were psychoanalysts, even though, despite being members of distinguished university faculties and respected Freudian institutes, they were too phobic to fly on planes. They were very old school about the treatment of phobias, which meant they believed in talking about “underlying issues.” My favorite uncle was at Yale Medical School and I remember how proud he was to have patients who had been with him for decades.
    My uncle would take an ocean liner to Europe when he had to go to a psychiatric convention abroad, and when his own father was on his deathbed in Los Angeles, he and my mother took a five-day train trip across the country rather then set foot on a plane. My grandfather died two days before they arrived.
    When Michael and I were students in graduate