After a small hiatus, we go return to our story.
She was an angel.
Her name was Maya.
A magical illusion.
A non-present entity, manifestation of the Gods, sent to observe my return to life.
Also, she happened to be a paramedic, probably still in med school, sitting across the ambulance, watching over me and not doing anything.
Which was just about fine by me.
After being almost crushed to death by a poplar tree, to me she is the first semblance of a normal human being coming up and about me. Tall, skinny, hands clasped over knees, her blurry image is pasted between the windows of the ambulance. The very epitome of an angel, with the white wings and the lack of focus for the halo around her head.
A magical reality.
No.
An illusion.
Well, that too, but mostly because of her toolbox.
The portable defibrillator.
When they tried to move me from my almost eternal hunting grounds (a.k.a. the lawn behind Mall Varna, where the incident happened) they put me on a stretcher. It is a normal customary practice, in order to keep me from dispatching myself and the probably broken bones yet unbeknownst to us all. The only little problem was – it hurt. Really hurt. A friggin` shitload of pressure suddenly goes up from my belly to my throat and tries hard enough to yank my breathing apparatus.
It was worse than being pinned down in the car some time ago. Because there was no tree on top of a car frame over me this time around. And thus fear fills in the missing pieces and paralyzes everything. Thankfully, after managing to hiss something about the angle of the stretcher, they stuck me in the ambulance and off we went to the ER.
With the angel. And the Defibrillator.
Med school doesn’t teach you how to handle trauma face first. Blood soaked faces and pure human empathy does. And in my case – just the fact that I wasn’t alone “in the deathcar, real life” (by iggy pop) made all the difference. The young gal simply stayed there and made sure I don’t faint.
And I see the big box of the defibrillator.
Perfect setup for me!
Never, probably, had a tool of this complexity and energy ever imagined being used for a propunder one’s legs.
But then it did. And it did its job perfectly. A relief for my troubled back. And I return haphazardly my breath. And I sigh a relief, literally.
In the meantime, from the rest of the posse following me, later on I learn that the ambulance took a shortcut through the pedestrian lanes below the canopy of the cemetery poplars, since the main highway is blocked totally by my … agent, the fallen poplar.
And so I arrive at a familiar sight.
The ER.
You see, it was because of the blood.