One of my favorite partners was a notorious serial dater. I loved working with him for many reasons but his dating life really added some entertaining spice to our day. His social life left little time for sleep or recreation and I was fascinated with how he juggled his long list of romantic entanglements. Most of his relationships tended to overlap and sometimes the various women involved would find out that their romance had not been exclusive. “I never said it was,” he’d tell me, confused as to why women would get so angry when they found out about the others. As EMS people, with unusual scheduling issues, these conflicts, of course, found their way to the workplace, since that is where his pool of date-able women often originated.
The furious aftermath of their short term alliances led to many angry women showing up at the station after work and during. Some left nasty letters on the ambulance and several would develop stalker behavior. He was always very unbothered by all this. Their problem was never going to become his, he told me. He had such a pleasant, cavalier attitude to everything. One of his ex’s threw a very thick milkshake at the ambulance windshield that used up all our washer fluid to remove. “She always had a very good arm,” he’d tell me.
Seeing how women were drawn to him was incredibly interesting as well. Women would come on to him while we would be treating their husbands family members. He told me about taking one woman out who had been the daughter in law of a previous patient. “The mother in law babysat her kids that night so she could cheat on her son!” he told me, almost as shocked by this as I was.
There was an ER doctor that he was seeing who was very comfortable with having a casual relationship. She seemed like a fun, nice woman and she also had a difficult schedule as well so my partner’s no drama personality suited her. But she also wanted a baby. She was getting older and the biological yearnings for a child were constantly warning her that her time was running out. She offered him a no-strings-attached deal to father the child she desperately wanted and was happy to raise alone. My partner said he would love to ‘help her out’. There were many shifts that were cut short as he left work early to provide his biological material. “She’s ovulating right now. I better hurry,” he’d tell me with all seriousness.
He had neglected to tell her, as he neglected to tell many of the woman he was dating, that he’d had a vasectomy years before, after the birth of his daughter. “Don’t you feel guilty?” I asked. “You’re robbing her of possibly her last chance to have a child of her own.”
“I’m doing this woman a favor,” he told me. “Kids are a lot of work. She has no idea what she’s in for.”
Sometime later she moved on to in-vitro fertilization, believing that all the issues to conceive were on her side, given that he had fathered a daughter.
Many of the women he dated would come to him with worries that they were ‘late’ and he would light up, telling them “that’s WONDERFUL! Maybe it will be a boy, and my daughter can have a brother! But I’m pretty sure you’re just late,” he would tell them, confidently.
There were some people who used the word misogynistic to describe him and his nefarious ways with women but I never thought so. In fact I felt he was very much the opposite. Most of his friendships were with women and he never said anything negative about the ones he dated. In fact he adored them, all of them, at the same time. His positive attitudes towards women could be found everywhere. A group of us were complaining about a much despised captain and conversation had spiraled downwards to making fun of the way her uniform would never fit in any flattering way, causing her to be compared to a misshapen garden gnome. My partner’s contribution to the discussion was to point out that she had lovely eyelashes, the kind any woman would die for. He said it with complete sincerity. He could always find something positive about anyone’s appearance and could offer styling tips to improve further.
But for a time his dating life caused us some issues at work, at least I felt they did. One of his ex’s, who was a nurse at a hospital we went to every day, was extremely hostile towards him, and I by association. I felt a bit uncomfortable talking to her because her personality around us was very curt and short and sometimes rude. But my partner took it in stride, refusing to acknowledge any difficulty and treating her with either saccharine friendliness or as if she were a complete stranger.
One day she was working in the non-urgent area where she was doing triage. We had brought our patient in, sat him in the waiting area, and put his name one the list. Wanting nothing to do with us she made every effort to make us wait as long as possible. Normally the triage nurse would listen to our presentation, sign for us so we could leave, and the patient would be registered by the time she called on him when it was his turn. But she would only talk to us when our patient was called in the order he was on the sign in sheet. She made sure that all the other people on the list ahead of him would be fully taken care of first, with detailed interviews, several sets of vital signs, writing on the forms very slowly, ripping them up and starting anew when she made a mistake. She seemed to think she was punishing us by preventing us from going out and getting another call. When she finally did get to our patient, the slow, lengthy triage process moved forward with lightning speed and without even looking up, she quickly signed her name in anger, almost ripping the form. I doubt she even heard one word of my synopsis.
None of this bothered my partner. But when our next non-urgent patient wanted to go to the same hospital and seeing my oh-here-we-go-again reaction he told me not to worry, things would be different.
At the hospital my partner took my paper and went over to the small triage room. He gave her a big smile through the small cut through as he took the sign in clipboard. Knowing that the last name on the list was our patient she would, as last time, go through every name before it slowly, calling everyone before ours, even those who had been called earlier and had not answered. My partner wrote several names on the list, using different handwriting, and ended with our patient. He quietly replaced the clipboard, handed me our call report, and remarked that even though we might wait a long time with this patient, he doubted we would with any future patients that day. He gave me a smile and went off to flirt with the girls at registration.
When his ex-girlfriend-triage-nurse came out she gave me an unappreciative glance and took the list. With her stalwart look of efficiency she stood before the waiting room with the clipboard and called out for Peter File. I could see the frustration in her face as Peter File failed to come forward. “Peter File!” she called loudly. “You’re next!”
When Peter File didn’t answer, she asked for Clea Torres. “Hello? I’m looking for a Clea Torres!” she shouted. Did she really not hear herself yelling out these juvenile fake names?
Apparently not, because she continued down the list asking for Hugh Jassol. She was getting a bit desperate because there was only one name left on the list before our patient. Hugh Jassol was called many, many times. The entire waiting room looked around smiling, wondering if there had really been parents so mean as to name their child in a way that would subject him to much bullying, no doubt.
The only name left now was Jack MeHoff. Jack MeHoff had to show or she’d be forced to deal with me after a normally short waiting period. How would her ex learn that he shouldn’t have ended things with her if his partner wasn’t mildly inconvenienced?
“Jack MeHoff!” she yelled. “Jack MeHoff?” She was pleading for there to be a real Jack MeHoff to come forward. Everyone in the room except her seemed to realize she was calling out a crude masturbatory term. You could hear the desperation in her voice. She even went so far as to ask several of the men in the waiting room. “Jack MeHoff?” she asked one man sitting in the back.
“Certainly not!” he indignantly told her.
Recent Comments