A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,34
the patients. For them today was just another day until words like dirty bomb and radiation and mass casualties began crackling over their med radio. Suddenly, ambulances were on the way with something horrible, something they weren’t prepared for.
When it’s all over, after we’ve been chewed out by the doctors, after the fire department has officially given up on their decon tent, after the radiation cloud has drifted off and killed the entire city, we’re released. On our way back to the station, we pass the missing ambulance. It’s strapped to the back of a tow truck like a sad, wounded animal. What became of the patients, I have no idea.
• • •
A week later, we receive our grade: room for improvement, but overall, not bad. Though we aren’t prepared to save ourselves, let alone anyone else, we’re good enough. That government at all levels is rubber-stamping disaster response and sentencing our preparedness to death by mediocrity isn’t surprising. In fact, it’s so much like M*A*S*H, I can’t help but laugh. So long as it remains in the abstract. Though nothing ever does.
A few months later, Sabrina and I visit New York City and go to the 9/11 museum at Ground Zero. A sign at the door says soldiers, police, and firefighters are given free admittance. I ask the girl at the ticket counter if EMTs, too, get in free. She shrugs and says no. Free admission is only for people whose sacrifices on that day—and every day since—the museum is meant to honor. And she has a point.
I don’t fight fires, and I’m not in the military. I’ve never been deployed. Never taken incoming rocket fire. I’ve never fired a shot in anger or been forced to watch my friends die. And though on occasion I’ve narrowly escaped death, it’s not a daily threat. And so I’m not a warrior, wounded or otherwise. I don’t have a medal, a prosthetic, PTSD.
What I do have is a scuff on the toe of my right boot. It’s a reminder. Not of the kid who was shot dead. Not that it was done execution-style and we found him facedown on the grass. Not that it was a large-caliber handgun that punched in the back of his skull and erased his forehead. Not that when I rolled him over, his face flopped down like congealed cheese off lukewarm pizza. Not that his brain slithered out into the wet grass. It’s a reminder of the curb, the one I nervously but gently kicked when his father came out. The one I dug my foot into as this man staggered over, vomited, and collapsed onto the driveway. The one I hid behind when he rose to his knees and wailed—bone-deep and pitch-perfect, humanity’s enduring anguish. I got that scuff there, barely three miles from home and four hours from the end of my shift. I got it waiting for a father swallowed up by his own grief to calmly and, in a voice I could understand, tell me his son’s full name. I got it because death, even horrific death, requires paperwork. I got it because it happened on my shift, and it was my job to get it.
Sabrina is as offended as I am. And why not? It’s her husband who, well intentioned but unprepared, will wander into a radioactive cloud. That some of us who wore this uniform never made it home is personal for her. More than I realized. And in her mind, if their sacrifice doesn’t merit free admission, they should at least be remembered.
Counted among those killed in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, were forty-three paramedics and EMTs.
Godspeed.
18
Death Before Discharge
The Fulton County Department of Public Health is a strange place to have an existential crisis, but here I am. Three days ago I was stuck with a dirty needle, and now I’m waiting on the results of my blood test. The possibility that I could be killed on the job has always been there, however remote, but that it could happen like this? By accident? A simple mistake on a routine call? It’s an insult. All the more so because it will be willfully ignored, because if even the 9/11 EMS dead don’t rate remembrance, what then of a lonely EMT who dies from a needle stick? So what I want to know—aside from whether I have hepatitis or AIDS—is whether it’s worth it.
Is it?
That I’d question whether a job is worth dying for hints at the