RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

know your medic

“So do you get a lot of gunshots?”

“Yeah, it’s great” he slipped.

He didn’t actually mean that gunshots were great, just that the power they generate is like candy for a paramedic. It was an accidental acknowledgement.

This was the first time I talked to Ben (name changed) since he started working as a medic. His home base is 19th and Oxford in North Philadelphia, but because of the critical ambulance shortages that I’m sure you’ve all read about, he’s responded to calls from as far away as Blue Bell.

He works 2, 10-hour day shifts, then 2 overnight. He says no one can understand what the job feels like except for other medics. He says that it’s not a job, it’s a constant, unending nightmare. He says that all citizens should be conscripted for a tour of duty in the back of an ambulance. He loves it.

At 3 in the morning he and his partner try for 20 minutes to pick up a 400lb woman in Olney. She’s sitting in the street, unresponsive. She’s fully conscious, high on PCP, alert, eyes darting everywhere, but she doesn’t respond to verbal commands and she won’t get up on her own. People on the street stop to watch the show.

It’s 4 in the morning, just an hour or so before the morning rush hour on Delaware Ave. By the time it starts, the road will be clear and no one will have any idea that a couple hours earlier, dozens of people worked half the night pulling a car out of the river. Things will look normal where just a few hours before medics measured the vital signs of a man they took out of that car. He’d been under water for hours and their job was to make his death official.

It’s the middle of the night on an alley street in North Philadelphia. There’s another ambulance there, but they’re on a different call. Someone was beaten, but that’s not your job. Your job is across the street where someone is having a heart attack. There are 2 crowds for 2 emergencies and people running around between them. You’re 22 years old and you’re the one in charge.

In all these situations, the police, the firefighters, the injured, the dying, their friends and their mothers look to you to tell them what to do. It’s 3 in the morning, you haven’t slept for 36 hours, people are screaming, people are dying, there’s vomit and blood everywhere, you’ve been on the job for less than a month and you’re the one in charge. Shifts are 10 hours, 4 days a week, all hours of the day and night, plus overtime. It’s not a job, it’s a nightmare.

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What I took out of our conversation was this: The next time your job is stressing you out, remind yourself to shut the fuck up.