departments, on ambulances, in hospitals, and as a supervisor. His marriage was on shaky ground. He’d reached the limits of what EMS could teach him. He was at the exact moment when the burned out either leave or turn into Killers. But Chris was a True Believer. For him there was nothing like being on an ambulance, having dinner interrupted by a shooting, being woken late at night to work a cardiac arrest, to laugh with the old and the infirm and the insane.
In all likelihood, he would have given up his supervisor’s white shirt and jumped back on an ambulance eventually, but I hastened his decision. When he showed up that day and sniffed out Jerry’s lie, he saw a young EMT, someone whose eyes were still wide to the wonder of EMS. Chris recognized an opportunity to start fresh, to love it again.
From day one, almost before Chris and I run our first call, EMS begins to click for me. Not merely as a distraction but as a career. As a calling. We laugh, we pull pranks, we run a shitload of calls. He leads patient care and I watch. He teaches me how to walk the fine line between exerting my authority and pissing people off, to casually check a patient’s fingers for the telltale burn marks of a crack user, to begin clocking my path of escape—either with or without the patient—from the moment I arrive on-scene. Chris never says it, but the implication is clear: He’s converting me into a True Believer.
12
Death by Broccoli
The dispatcher never stops talking. Talking to us, talking to other crews, talking to supervisors, occasionally talking to herself. Her voice is the one constant of this job, and though we hear everything she says, no words get our attention quite like cardiac arrest. Of all the calls we run, this one looms largest. A patient in cardiac arrest is essentially dead—his heart has stopped beating—but if we get there fast enough, we can change that. Working an arrest is our opportunity to not merely save a life but raise the dead.
By Thanksgiving, I still haven’t run one. I’m brand-new and desperate to put my skills to use, and when you boil down that statement, what it really means is I’m hoping for something bad to happen to a perfect stranger. Morbid? Maybe. But it’s going to happen anyway. I might as well be there when it does. So I wait. And I hope. I get frustrated.
Chris knows better. The holidays are approaching. People always die during the holidays. He says that in his ten-plus years of EMS, he can’t recall a single major holiday when he hasn’t worked a cardiac arrest. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We’re due.”
Thanksgiving starts out unusually quiet. The radio hardly makes a sound. We watch the parade, we watch football, we cook dinner. Just a few miles away, there is a family doing the same thing. They’re a big group, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, Mom, Dad, even Dad’s girlfriend. Grandma totters around the kitchen in a brightly colored muumuu, cooking and trying not to think about Granddad, who, stroked out and wearing diapers, is groaning on a mattress in the back bedroom. Two of her children have never gotten along. In years past, Granddad—tipsy but imperious—kept everyone in check. This year, emboldened by Granddad’s absence, the brothers have argued nonstop.
They snap at each other over turkey, over stuffing, over sweet potatoes and collards and cheap wine. Grandma, now occupying the head of the table, stabs her fork into the broccoli and tells them to stop. This is Thanksgiving. Be happy, be nice. Be thankful. They get quiet just long enough for Grandma to stuff the entire floret of broccoli in her mouth. And then another dig. The younger brother, furious, yells back. Both men stand and Grandma slams her fork down. Mouth full of broccoli, she takes an ill-advised breath before telling them to stop, once and for all. This is the moment the family’s been waiting for—Grandma, aging but in charge, throwing her significant weight around and putting these half-drunk men in their place.
But not a word comes. There’s silence from the head of the table. A tangible silence that seems for the briefest of moments like the calm before the storm. Of course, there’s no storm, just a desperate grunt, the final whiff of air sneaking out of Grandma’s fully blocked airway. She bangs her hand on the table as the stringy, pulpy greenness