"Wolfie" the REAL Siren

 

This is “Wolfie.” He’s the real stuffed animal that was given to Lucy on her ambulance ride after having seizures, and the inspiration behind the book Siren the Ambulance Wolf Pup.

 

What’s great about Wolfie, is how timely his entrance was into our lives. Lucy and I were both scared, sitting in the back of the ambulance, not knowing what was happening. Not yet knowing she was having seizures (I had never seen one in person before). Just that something was terribly wrong. We didn’t have time to grab her favorite blanket, her favorite stuffed animals, or anything else that would have given her comfort. We just wanted to get to the hospital as quickly as possible.

 

I had walked out of the bathroom that morning and found Lucy laying lifeless on the floor, her face blue, completely unresponsive. The Rutherford County EMS got to our house very quickly, and we just left. As you can imagine, my only thought was Lucy’s well-being, not if we should grab anything on the way out the door.

 

So when Lucy finally woke up in the ambulance, she was understandably confused, scared, and needed something to hold, besides her Daddy’s hand, to comfort her.

 

That’s when Wolfie showed up.

 

The EMT who was in the back of the ambulance with us, just happened to have this little stuffed wolf toy. I still to this day don’t know where it came from, or the reason he had it in the back of the ambulance. But this little toy was so important to helping Lucy and giving her comfort.

If you've read the story you know Wolfie came home with us. After a nice long bath in our washing machine (because who knows how long he had ridden in the ambulance, right?) he began to sleep with Lucy every night. He was special. He was there through a traumatic experience with Lucy, right beside her in her bed the entire time we were at the hospital.

 

It wasn’t long after we got home that I started telling Lucy bedtimes stories about her trip to the hospital, and how she met Wolfie. The story eventually began to be told from Wolfie’s perspective, with me doing a not so great impression of what I thought a wolf pup’s voice might sound like. The more I told the story to her, the more this little character of a wolf pup who rides around in an ambulance, comforting children was stuck in my mind. Several years passed, and this character was bouncing around in my head, dying to get out.

 

I finally decided to sit down, put the proverbial pen to paper, and write out the story. And with that, Siren the Ambulance Wolf Pup was born.