FROM ISSUE #56: WAITING
JOE FASSLER is author of Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process and the forthcoming novel The Sky Was Ours (Penguin, 2022). He lives in Denver.
EARLY ON A WEDNESDAY MORNING, I heard an anguished cry—then silence.
I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.
“Something’s wrong,” she gasped.
Timestamp: September 18, 2013. About 8 am.
This scared me. Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Iowa City as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her blood. She runs marathons, loves the grueling challenge of it—and once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before the race, she limped across the finish line anyway.
So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, her eyes screwed shut with pain, I knew it was bad. I called the ambulance. I gave the dispatcher our address then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.
Average ambulance response time for Brooklyn, New York, in September 2013: six minutes, twenty-nine seconds.
I cradled her body on the floor. “Oh, they’re going to take so long,” she whispered, her voice hushed with grief. “It’s going to take so long.”
We knew this was likely: once, in Fort Greene Park, Rachel and I watched a young girl fly over her bicycle handlebars and land on her skull. She lay on the ground in a terrible splay of limbs, still as the dead. We called 911 three times, but it was twenty minutes before we saw red and blue lights start to flicker though the trees.
I don’t know how long it took for the ambulance to reach us that Wednesday morning. Pain and panic have a way of distorting time, ballooning it, then compressing it again. But when we heard the mournful sirens wailing somewhere far away, we knew they were coming for us. My whole body flooded with relief.
I didn’t know our wait was just beginning.
I buzzed the EMTs into our apartment. They wore bright reflective vests and carried medical gear. We knew the answers to their questions. When did the pain start? That morning. Where was it on a scale of one to ten, ten being worst?
“Eleven,” Rachel croaked.
We knew the rough date of her last period, her medical history (nothing major). No, she’d never had a kidney stone.
We also knew we didn’t want to be taken to the
