Her hair is flaming orange-red, eyes bright and lively and her baby a masterpiece of tiny humanity. Barely hitting the five foot mark, she has on an emerald dress, black simple shoes and a white bonnet perched atop the sunset that are her locks. The baby girl is wearing a miniature navy blue dress with the same simple lines. Even the wee puffed sleeves are the same as her mama’s – and (I can hardly bear the overload of cute) her tiny head has an impossibly adorably tiny white bonnet.
But I’m here for the husband, and I tear my eyes away with what I hope is professionalism as I continue introducing myself to everyone behind the curtain in bay 6. Curly hair tops his face and the beard of a married Amish man fringes his chin. Homemade black pants, simple black shoes and a teal shirt also handmade complete his traditional garb. His right hand is elevated and wrapped within an inch of its life. Bright red blood has soaked thru a patch roughly one inch by one inch.
He tells the story of slipping at work – work is in a local shop crafting the traditional Amish furniture us English people are happy to pay good money for, knowing it will last for generations upon generations. With a crooked grin, he denies pain. I tell him there is no shame in pain medicine, and point out that he is slightly pale. He feigns astonishment and points to his chest with eyes exaggeratedly elevated. She giggles. His top lip curls as he waves away an imaginary syringe. He’s fine.
Once he’s on the cot, we turn to the idea of transporting the wife and baby. Feeling foolish (do Amish use car seats? I think not?) But needing to ask, I receive a shake of the head in reply. A nurse offers to run upstairs to OB and borrow a car seat. Returning, the nurse and my partner take the mama and baby to our truck in the garage.
I wheel the cot with my very entertaining patient to the nurse’s station and get the transfer paperwork, then head to the truck. The diminutive little mama is standing outside with her hands folded, the side door is open and there are now three adults inside securing the car seat to the seat chosen inside. I look at her, she looks at me. I ask her “how many English does it take to put in a car seat?” and she laughs a big belly laugh.
Soon after, the sleeping baby is fastened inside the car seat straps, the car seat solidly in place, mama buckled nearby in case the baby isn’t fond of her new contraption and the patient and I joining them – we’re on our way.
Heading down the road, I do the usual routine of putting the blood pressure cuff and cardiac leads as well as pulse oximeter on my patient, then begin entering demographic details into the tablet. All the while I keep up a patter like usual, asking for a pain rating, asking if he gets carsick, asking if he’s nauseous now or has been since he’s been in the ER. I tell him the blood pressure cuff will inflate every ten minutes and when he asks about the pulse oximeter, I tell him in plain language what it does. He wants to know how. I tell him. He’s fascinated, and so is his wife. Then she asks about the three wires, how they tell me about his heart? I tell them, again utter fascination. He points to the blood pressure cuff and asks why it gets tight. I tell them blood pressure is measured that way – blank looks. I outline briefly how the top number – I point to the monitor display of his last reading – tells me the pressure in his vessels that the heart pumps against when it squeezes, or beats. The bottom number - heads swivel back to the monitor – is the pressure in his vessels when his heart is at rest. They ask what’s good? And we talk about what’s good. They ask, what if it is lower or higher? And we talk about passing out, we talk about damage to the heart over time if the numbers are high for long periods of time like months or years. They are bright, quick thinking and soaking everything in like sponges.
I finally tell them that their baby girl is quite honestly one of the cutest babies I have ever seen. Her miniature nose and mouth are perfect, her eyelashes long and sweeping as she sleeps without objection in her English car seat. The bonnet framing her face is no more than 5 inches wide and I can’t imagine the loving care those tiny stitches took.
The redheaded mama beams and says, “yes, she’s our cutest baby yet” and upon further conversing I find out that they have six more small children at home. Neither one of them are yet 30. He is teasing her and she is giving it right back. They are laughing and I comment on how great it is that he is so composed despite donating part of at least two fingers to a saw back at the shop. He says “aww, it ain’t my first time, naw!” and she rolls her eyes at me. “Ja, he’s not kidding you”. She tells me he used to write her beautiful love letters when they were courting, that they didn’t see each other often. I ask if they lived far apart. Yes, she answers, they lived 17 miles apart.
He’s grinning and nodding, interjecting that he did write very good love letters, that she was the prettiest little thing he’d seen and he wanted her to think of him often and so writing often helped that. He tells me dynamite comes in small packages, and she playfully lightly kicks the back of his upright head of the cot. He grins wider and tells me, “see?!”
We’re leaving the second small town we pass thru on our way to the city, and the specialty care he’s going to need to make that hand useful again. He tells me how funny it is to watch the countryside receding in reverse. Then his jocularity falls aside, he raises the worn, strong, unharmed hand and points to the back door of the ambulance. Outside, the setting sun is painting warm pastels across the cornfields, and his face softens. Tipping his head, he asks me, “Do you ever wonder how people can’t believe there’s a Creator with a sunset like that?” He shakes his head and says, “I’m glad He made all of this and gave me my redheaded girl”. Her head ducks, but even the flaming hair beneath the bonnet can’t hide her smile.
I lean my head back against the wall of the ambulance and I look at their exquisite baby girl – their 7th child – and I smile in peaceful delight at their simple, happy, wonderful life. Love letters and babies, hard work and faith, struggles and pain and teasing and flirting even after more than half a dozen children. Ten days earlier in this same truck I’d worked the cardiac arrest of a very different Amish baby, and her white lifeless body just wouldn’t come back to us. Now, on this night, the simple faith and peaceful energy replaced the dread I’d felt to some degree each time I’d climbed into the back of this truck.
Ebb and flow, life and death – my mind remembered Verve Pipe from the 90s – “it’s a bittersweet symphony that’s life”. Let it wash over you, let it take nothing, oh – but let it leave shining moments such as these, driving down the road with this beautiful simple little family full of love. I’m better for the conversation I had in those 40 minutes driving down a summer two lane road in Wisconsin with a redheaded little lady, her precious baby girl, and her head over heels in love husband with a penchant for slipping into saws.
I needed that.
