A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,3
dripped into the water. His skin hung slack where his jaw should’ve been. I was young, scared, overwhelmed. I did the only thing bystanders are asked not to do in an emergency: I panicked.
• • •
Seven years later, here I am. In EMT school. The door is shut, class has started. I’m embarking on a career that will require me not merely to witness emergencies but to participate in the rescue. I can’t help thinking I’ve made a huge mistake.
With me in the classroom are two dozen misfits, all looking for a respectable job. Our instructor is Alan, a lifelong medic who came up when EMS was in its infancy. He tells stories of running calls on dark streets and in cramped apartments. His tales smell of blood and desperation. They’re real and exciting but scary, since eventually the dying patients will be ours. And though we’re a long way from that, the photographs in the book make clear what awaits us. Maybe he can read my mind—hell, maybe I’m not the only one having second thoughts—because Alan tells us, right out of the gate, if we’re not sure we can handle this, now is the time to leave. A couple of people laugh as though the mere suggestion is ridiculous, but I’m not one of them. I didn’t grow up wanting to be an EMT, nor do I know if I’ll like it. What I do know is I want to get hip-deep in the things that matter. I want to know if I’m more than the kid who panicked that summer day in 1997. I want to know if I can be counted on.
So I stay.
2
From Zero to Hero
Modern medicine is practiced in the light. It is technology and advanced diagnostics, a digital brain whirring at fiber-optic speed. It is ultrasounds and sonograms and blood work and radiation, human intelligence blown up and expanded to realize inhuman capabilities. Patients are treated in a controlled, sterile environment where accountability, procedures, protocol, and hierarchy are all carved in stone.
Precise, clean, cerebral.
EMS is none of these things.
According to Alan, EMS is wild and imperfect. Just like our patients, it’s dangerous and a little mad and possibly contagious. Alan regards the job as a throwback to nineteenth-century house-call medicine—patients don’t come to us, he says, we go to them, and where and how we find them, well, that, too, is part of the story. Once in the field, we should expect no help; we’ll have no team of lab techs waiting for tissue samples or blood samples or stool samples. We’ll have a blood pressure cuff and a stethoscope. A wristwatch. A flashlight. We’ll have common sense and eight months of school. Alan promises that once we’re done with class, we’ll find EMS simple and uncluttered and intensely personal, because it’s one thing for a patient to die on a hospital bed beneath the glare of a thousand watts of fluorescent lighting, but it’s something else entirely for a man to die on his living room floor with his family looking on. And yet Alan believes the essence of EMS is not that a man has died here in so intimate and messy a setting. The essence of EMS is that we know we’ll be back tomorrow, because even from here—surrounded by the hysteria of an unexpected death—we’ll hear a baby coughing in the next room.
To be good, Alan says, we can’t just treat patients; we must study them. Learn their language, their habits, their streets and houses, their peculiar beliefs, fears, and failings. Many of these people will be nothing like we are, nothing like anything we’ve ever seen. Of course, he says, there are the sane, the stable, the middle class, and the wealthy—the boring—who sometimes call, but in the upside-down world of EMS, these are the lunatic fringe. The heavy lifting is done by people who call every day, for every conceivable reason. Invited as we are into their disparate lives, we’ll not only treat them, save them, and pronounce them dead; we’ll also learn from them.
Alan reviews the syllabus and I drift off, start writing in my textbook. I think about what he’s said and, daydreaming, imagine myself stumbling on some alien culture, removed from mine by time and space. I think of all the artifacts I’ll find, how I’ll carefully unearth and catalog them. How I’ll set them aside for later viewing in the museum of my own recollection.