Let’s Hear It for the Glorious Paramedics with the Santa Cruz Fire Department!!!

Bill had just made his incomparable Scrambled Eggs with Cheese…I was sitting at my place listening to chatter about Marilyn Monroe and Louis Calhern in The Asphalt Jungle (remember my husband is a film historian)…Bill was telling the table (three burly grandsons and one robust girlfriend) that, when I was a little girl (ten years oldish) Louis Calhern had taken me to lunch. (My family as well as Mr. Calhern lived at The Garden of Allah, a Hollywood hangout, and around the pool, I’d made good friends with Mr. Calhern—who was living with Dorothy Gish, his ex-wife Natalie Schafer living next door keeping company with journalist Thornton Delahanty…more to come in my memoir…)
Next thing I knew, the five of them were barking at me, “Sylvia, Sylvia!” and the girlfriend was saying, “We have to call 9-1-1.” Being highly competent, she did.
OK, turns out I’d, um, passed out. For five long minutes. Couldn’t be roused. But the odd thing is, I hadn’t one whiff of feeling disabled…I couldn’t understand why all these people’s faces were so screwed up with anxiety, why Bill was pressing my hands…
The crew that came in the blink of an eye could be in a movie. SO HANDSOME, SO GORGEOUS—luscious young Kyle in his horn-rimmed glasses kept stroking my hands as he asked me one question after another, I kept smiling, nodding, responding, bemused.
Above all, to this feminist, the frosting on the cake was that I learned The Captain of this glorious six-young-person crew was a beautiful blonde named Olivia.
When I walked outside, I was horrified, dumbstruck, to see a monster red fire truck filling our street PLUS a big huge red ambulance beside it. Oh dear, I hope the neighbors don’t see them…If anyone was home, how could they miss?
But then my ride in the back of the ambulance chatting with Wonderful Paramedic Donna was fun-and-a-half—remember, all this was bewildering to me. Donna manipulated seven technical chores at once while chatting, asking me probing questions. What a doll. (And, can you imagine, in the E.R. an hour after delivering me, she came into the exam room where I was parked smiling, saying, “NOW we gotcha! Saw your blog!” “How did you–?” “We have our ways…” I mean you have to adore someone like that…)
So I spent the day and night (not one moment’s sleep) in Dominican Hospital. Everyone was super marvelous. The food was amazingly tasty (pulled pork for dinner), nurses and aides were exceptional, my attending doctor was so impressive I said to my nurse, “Are you married?” she said “Yes,” then I said, “Well, if you weren’t and he isn’t, I’d sure set my cap for him…”
Diagnosis? Not sure yet. Waiting on the results of some heart exams. The damn consequence of this unfortunate event is that, of course, I no longer can get behind the wheel of an automobile…I mean, who wants an old lady who might pass out tooling around town?
So the day has come. Another concern is that, should it happen again, I might fall and break a hip and that’s the end…
But I’m hoping not to do that. After all, the attending doctor, when I was begging him to let me go home before the results of the heart tests came back, said, “Well, you have a grip like steel” (my handshake), “you’re sounding vigorous” (all thanks to Cross-Fit), “yes, I think—”
So I got to come home. But, dear hearts, clearly my life has vastly changed. Not going to let it get to me. Thank heavens we live in a town with grandsons and plenty of Uber and Lyft drivers, we can squeak it out of our budget, I’ll just have more time at home and not have to waste it doing vapid stuff like marketing…there are numerous markets that deliver. And my daughter will be happy because she’s been after me not to drive for some time.
Oy. How I’ve fought it…
Now to edit Death in Costa Bella—new title of Bill’s and my novel. We’re self-publishing. A good editor friend—one who’s published Very Big Books–recommended this. “It’s just too hard, the odds are too great…” We’re blessed to  have a fabulous book designer who’s already sent pages for us to see—she’ll have a cover to approve soon…
And tomorrow? When I officially will have lived ninety-one years on this planet? I hope it’s a happy day. It will be a day of gratitude for me, that’s for sure.
Onward! Upward! Forward!
And big hugs.