“How did you get into the moving old people around business?” I asked the medical transport team.
They were the capable young people who would be moving me from the hospital where I had had hip surgery to the rehab center where I was going to recover.
They had all been students in the Pasadena City College nursing program and were about to prove to me how right they were for their jobs.
“Not too tight,” I said to one of the young men who brought a buckle around to secure me to the gurney. “I’m a bit claustrophobic.”
I could feel my heart racing as we neared the elevator.
“I hear you are a writer,” said the young man who had attached me to the gurney. “What is your favorite story that you have ever written?”
It was a stroke of genius on the young man’s part, and we were all transported to my meeting with Elvis Presley when I was 13. How he sang “Love Me Tender” to me and left me with a lifetime of writing stories.
“Wait until my mom hears this,” laughed another student, a young woman. “She used to sing that while she was making dinner every night.”
By this time, we are in the parking lot, and I am being wheeled over to the transport vehicle.
Tiny doesn’t even touch the size of the enclosed area. Intellectually, I understood this was for my safety, but that wasn’t helping my breathing. The boys led me in a calming exercise, but I was too far gone. I was looking around desperately, trying to find some type of primitive escape path that might make me feel safe, or at least not crazy.
Finally, I suggested in a ridiculously lighthearted voice that they just leave me in the parking lot.
“I can call my daughter or any of my friends and they will come and pick me up.”
The young man assured me that, as persuasive as I was, they were not going to leave an older woman with a broken hip alone in a parking lot.
Finally, the magic bullet came to me. I was watching one of the boys through the glass folding doors that closed the vehicle.
“Do these doors open from the inside?” I asked.
The dark-haired young woman demonstrated that we were not locked in.
“Let’s roll,” I directed and went back to finishing the Elvis story.
Hugging my heroes goodbye after our safe arrival, I felt so hopeful that the future of nursing was in such capable, caring hands.