An avid horseback rider expert at dressage — ''ballet on a thousand pounds'' — she keeps two horses at home, where she also enjoys cooking and growing vegetables and flowers.

She'll keep playing in chamber music groups and solo recitals, performing favorite composers like Beethoven and Brahms. And she'll play for free for her paramedic friends at Alamo EMS.

She has one word for her new job: ''Exciting.''

''You get to move around, you get to be outside, and you never know what is going to happen next. There are a lot of physical challenges'' — like getting a 600-pound patient out of a fourth-floor walk-up apartment on a recent call.

Playing with other musicians and being a paramedic both involve ''a lot of teamwork and creativity,'' she says. ''You have to be very creative in figuring out how to move a patient. You work with a partner, plus police and firefighters. Everyone has a job to do.''

She likes to use a patient's personal surroundings as a diagnostic tool. ''You can learn a lot looking at where a patient lives, who they live with, how they live,'' she says. ''You assess not only their body, but their environment, their mental state.''

Donaruma, an Oklahoma native, had a father who was a violinist, a conductor and a public school teacher. Her mother was a secretary. The family is descended from John Howland, who came to America on the Mayflower. ''He was drunk and fell into the water shortly before the ship docked,'' she says, laughing. ''But he survived to make progeny in the new world.''

For the past several years, she juggled Philharmonic duties with paramedic courses at Dutchess Community College, while working several EMT shifts a month.

Once, as a student, she was watching a surgeon perform a hernia procedure, with music piped into the operating room — a Philharmonic recording.

''So in my peepy little student voice, I said, 'Oh, I'm on that record.' And the surgeon said, 'WHAT are you doing in here?'''