The only famous patient I ever had was a porn actress.

I did an internet search about her after the call and she's done more than three hundred movies, which scares me because she looked poor as hell. But that's what happens when you do whatever drugs it was that she was on. It soaks up money and brain cells and health. She asked if I'd sleep with her and then asked me if she could have an HIV test. The whole time she was bleeding. We tried to stop it, but when you have a hundred gashes from glass shards all over your body, you quickly run out of gauze.

She'd jumped through a bank window. Although one bystander said she was thrown. Another said she "flew through it."

Apparently porn actresses can fly.

It was a Wells Fargo, which is a bank that's always given me the creeps. It's logo is a stagecoach and as far as I know those things are constantly robbed. At least in the old times. And I get a hell of a lot of Nigerian spam marked with Wells Fargo in the subject line.

I didn't ask her if she was robbing the bank or got robbed or tripped or what the hell happened, because she was trying to kiss me, more than once, and no one looks attractive covered in blood, especially when they're begging for an AIDS test.

I told her to stay supine and she said I talked funny. I went up front to tell my partner to hurry the hell up and get to the E.R. before she started trying to tear my clothes off and when I turned around she was standing up. I told her to sit down and she asked if I was going to screw her or not. I said no, because there are cameras in the back of our ambulances now and because of the blood and the drug addiction and the porn background and the fact that I'm gay and in a good relationship and have been trying to be a strict born again Hindu and I was currently in the middle of working. So she turned around, went to the back door of the ambulance, kicked it open, and leaped.

We were going sixty miles an hour.

She hit pavement and, I swear, bounced up onto her feet and started running.

Drugs can do that. They can turn you into Superman or Green Lantern or Wonder Woman or Owlwoman or whatever the hell she was.

I watched her pummel her body over the beat-up grey Eisenhower Expressway wall divider, stopping traffic in the other lane, praying to Shiva that she wasn't hit.

I asked my partner what we should do, but he said patients have complete ability to withdraw consent and she had withdrawn everything. We radioed it in and later the police said that they found her inside someone's garage, lying in the backseat of a family van, asleep, blood all over the seats. The father who discovered her back there even recognized her, and the cop who told me the story said that she gave him an autograph. That's the great thing about this life. He'd probably wished for her a thousand times and then suddenly one day his dream woman was right there for him, near dead, a broken collarbone, with her limbs shaking from withdrawal like this world is one big tectonic earthquake.