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Trust

by Patrick LeClerc
2 minutes

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It's a good thing my wife trusts me.

OK, a little background. The profession of EMS is famed for a...tendency towards infidelity. In fact, we have said that the acronym may well stand for Extra Marital Sex. We work long hours, spend overnight shifts with partners of the opposite sex, all of whom share a somewhat skewed worldview, we go through a lot together that makes us close and shuts a lot of normal people out. Being attracted to your coworkers in pretty natural. And cheating is, a least in theory, pretty easy for us. We are often held late, and often out of contact, so the "Honey, I won't be home until...whenever" call is pretty common.

Plus, we will all cover for one another, since I may well need my partner to watch my back on an uncontrolled shooting scene, or when I violate a stupid protocol in the interest of a patient, or have to punch a combative drunk in the mouth and claim he tripped and he turns out to be the mayor's son.

So the cheating is there. Not as much as in the police department, but it's there. And so is the suspicion. One of my male partners once had to hand his cell phone over to me to confirm to his girlfriend that we were in fact working, on the truck, and I wasn't "some cheap skank he was banging." I had to hit the siren before she believed me that we were at work.

That clusterfuck came about because, while he was at work, a supervisor called his house to offer him overtime. The supervisor didn't realize he was already on the clock, since we were out saving lives and making a difference, and called his house. His girlfriend, who, not working in EMS, assumed that a supervisor would have some freaking clue where his employees were, figured that he was lying about taking the shift and running around on her.

He was, in fact, cheating on her, just not that particular night.

That's the background. As far as my relationship, I've never cheated, and my wife is comfortable with me working the shifts I do, and has met most of my partners, and gone to dinner with my attractive longtime female partner with whom I traded hideously inappropriate double entendres for 24 hours a week on the truck.

So, anyway, this one time, at Band Cam-- on the ambulance, my partner Kristina complained that car was in the shop. I asked her how she was getting home, and she said she'd have family pick her up. Since we never, ever got out on time, and we were stuck on shift together until they let us go, and since she lived in the town where we worked, I told her to call home and tell them they were off the hook, I'd drop her off on my way home.

So she did and I did, and all was well.

As I walked in the door of my Aluminum Palace in trendy Londonderry, my lovely wife greeted me with "Listen to the answering machine."

"Do what to the what now?" I replied, quick as ever.

"The machine," she grinned. "Just listen and tell me what I'm supposed to think."

Ok, thinks I, sounds harmless and I walked over and pressed the button.

And heard "Hi Mike? This is Krissy. I think I left my purse in your car. Call me when you get a chance, ok? Thanks for everything. Bye bye."

Fortunately, my lovely wife found this funny, and not threatening. Had I married a lesser woman I might have returned home to my stuff on the lawn or a butcher knife revision of my circumcision.

Being that we do live in a trailer park, that might have gone fairly unremarked.