Kick me in the face
The first ambulance was for someone else, but the second was for me
An ambulance came for me this week. The paramedics weren’t sure what they would find.
It wasn’t like the last time an ambulance came. That was a few months back, in the dark of the early morning. Our dog Teddy started barking and my wife Vic woke me, saying she could hear someone fiddling with the fly screen on the front door.
I walked out in my boxer shorts to a woman wearing high-vis gear and a mask, shining a phone-torch light through the stag etching on our front-door window.
“Did you call an ambulance?” this paramedic asked through the glass.
“No, sorry, I didn’t,” I said. I briefly wondered why in situations like this we default to an apology, merely for being involved in a waste of time, however indirectly.
The paramedic peered through the glass and over my shoulder, as though she suspected I was being disingenuous, withholding an emergency.
After the paramedic left I joked to Vic that Teddy was proving his worth as a guard dog. By alerting us that someone had… come to the front door and knocked.
- – — – -
This week, the ambulance came for me.
