Nebraska

The plane smelled of cabbage and potatoes. I was still in Seattle, albeit rolling down the runway at SeaTac airport, and already I was feeling far from home. It was the smell...and the 300 pound mother that was way too comfortable sharing half my seat with me. I used to be really touchy-feely in my 20's; you know, walking hand in hand with friends down the street or hugging all the time. And, though I've lost some of that I wouldn't say I'm touch phobic or need tons of personal space. But having strangers rub up against me in an airplane, forearm on forearm, ass on thigh, really creeps me out. Of course if that stranger happened to be really hot and had dark intentions I might have a different take on the situation. Let's just say this stranger wasn't...and thank god, didn't. And again, there was the smell of boiled cabbage. I was flying to Omaha, Nebraska and already had more than a little apprehension about the trip. I was actually quite anxious about spending two weeks in a mid-sized, Midwestern city. I know this sounds silly as I have recently cycled thousands of miles through parts of Asia just over a year ago. But being born and raised on the West coast of America, I have more of an affinity for liberal cultures and exotic spicy foods than I do traditional family values and Jello salad. In other words, I'm a total snob. I know people are people everywhere you go, with the same issues and concerns and fears. But I know too that we're just better out here on the coast! So I was afraid. Afraid of the food I'd have to eat for two weeks. Afraid of being in a land of Folgers coffee and dead air. Air not blown-in, cold and fresh, cleansed by thousands of miles of Pacific ocean, but air thick with farm chemicals... pre-used and exhaled by the millions of people west of me. Afraid too, of the folks immortalized by the national media...the ones that have more of a liking to the NRA than Greenpeace. I was heading to red state country wondering where I'd find tofu and rice milk. Snob yes, and watching this mother next to me constantly chiding and "no-ing" and riding and "don't-ing" and nitpicking her little girl (for being a little girl no less) had me guessing that she hadn't received her last subscription of Montessori Now or Today's Parent. You know, those "helpful" magazines that try to prevent you from creating a totally neurotic and miserable person in your own image that furtively looks around while biting her nails down to bloody, painful stumps.
I've always like cabbage. I've even planted a few in my garden this year. But the smell on the plane had me thinking of German food gone bad. Bad from years of Midwestern tinkering. Tinkering like, oh, I don't know, removing all spices and exotic flavors and replacing them with extra boiling and salt. It was becoming oppressive and I was actually looking forward to the thick Omaha air. Not that I'd be out in it that much. I was here to take a two week crash course in learning the art of being a Paramedic. A year long class boiled down into two weeks for nurses who had critical care/ER experience and who also happened to be active EMT's. Both of us! The class itself was long and hard and demanding as we practiced intubations in the OR's of the areas hospitals before our 8 hour lectures, then practiced running ambulance calls out of the city's many fire stations afterwards. Long days for sure but somehow I began to gel into the rhythm of sleeplessness and stress. And unexpectedly I really started to like the town of Omaha. Obamaha it ISN'T. Blue state, not. And the food... I actually took a photo of my burrito at a local Mexican restaurant. A burrito! How can you screw up a burrito? Easy, by burying it in melted Velveeta cheese. Sadly I ate almost the whole damn thing and I wasn't even drunk. But the park along the river, the beautiful old Creighton University campus and the little downtown section that had the charm of an old frontier outpost now yuppified with "too cute" boutique shops and even a real cafe with espresso, was surprising and very sweet. It made me forget the segregation only a half mile away where I was instructed to never go and never park my car...better yet, never even think about that part of town. But go there I did.
Station twenty one. The knife and gun club was located on the edge of that crappy part of town and I stayed there one evening waiting for my first gunshot victim like a kid waiting for Christmas. Would it be a gunshot wound (GSW) to the head with airway complications?! Or maybe a GSW to the chest with a collapsed lung that I could insert a needle into and re-inflate! Or maybe a stab wound to the belly that would be bleeding badly. OK, I know it's sick but after sitting in a classroom all day and going over this stuff and how to deal with it, you kind of want to get your (gloved) hands dirty and use your knowledge. The trouble is that there is a known phenomenon called the student syndrome. If a student is standing by waiting for something bad to happen it never will. Hence, the only calls I got that night were abdominal pains NOT from guns or knives but from constipation. Without going into details I will just tell you that after being on the receiving end of these patient transfers in the ER, as a nurse, heart sinking while the medic tells me an enema is probably in my future, there was a certain glee in dumping off that same patient and getting back out on the open road!
Station forty three. Another sketchy part of town that had good trauma potential... except for the student syndrome that followed me around Omaha. After nights and nights of sitting around catching up on the golf channel (there is something odd about firefighters and tons of crappy TV) a potential winner of a call was finally paged out as an assault with injuries. Here it was at last. My trauma moment. Pulling up to the house in Crapville, there were multiple cruisers with lights flashing and the scene was determined to be safe. As we entered the house, (and why is it that almost every house I saw in Omaha was cluttered with piles of dirty dishes/magazines/ blankets/trash and smelled of old laundry, dirty pets, and cabbage?) a father and son had gone at each other and the son appeared to have won. It didn't help that the dad was in his late 60's! I guess if your drunk dad comes at you with a baseball bat, even if he is a sexagenarian you might break a pane of glass over his head too. But who am I to judge...OK it was really f%#@ed up and this was like Jerry Springer except live, in the back of an ambulance, and I was holding this old guy's carotid artery as he was saying "What do you mean I'm going to jail...He's the one who cut my throat!" Strains of the banjo music from Deliverance twanged through my head as we bounced toward the hospital.
Two weeks have never rushed by in my life so slowly. The airport was like a church for me on the last day in Nebraska. A safe haven to thank god for better things to come in my life. Like Seattle...in just a few short hours. Seattle and Washington and it's smell of freshly ground coffee, pine trees and cabbage free sea breezes.