made it six months. That’s the first threshold. If I haven’t been fired or quit or killed by then, I’ll probably make it. In the meantime, they ignore me.
Outside of work, on the street and among friends, it’s different. The minute I say I work for Grady, I have everyone’s attention. The place is so revered, so feared, so mythologized that saying I work here gets the same reaction every time: I bet you see some crazy shit.
And I do. I’ve treated a woman stabbed by a stingray at the aquarium. I’ve run calls on football players, washed-up actors, and hysterical strippers. I’ve been called out to the projects, the Capitol building, the high-rises, the highway, the jails and churches, even Tent City—a squatters’ refuge on the edge of town. The hospital itself, yeah, it’s crazy, too. In some ways, a little too crazy. Like right now, for instance. I’m sitting in a small auditorium on the edge of campus listening to a speech on booby traps. Nobody’s sure who’s setting them or why, but we all agree the perpetrator needs to die. Slowly. Painfully.
Every few weeks another booby trap shows up. Maybe it’s a dirty needle, uncapped and taped to the bottom of a seat. Maybe the needle has been stuck through the foam blocks we use to immobilize patients. Maybe it’s poking out from under the hood. Today we’re listening to an administrator who has placed a picture on the overhead projector. He flicks it on, and the image—projected onto a screen at a terrifying twelve feet by twelve feet—is of a plastic bag filled with piss and bristling with uncapped needles. “This was found in an ambulance yesterday,” he says. “It was just sitting there in an overhead compartment.” He keeps talking but we care about only one thing—who’s doing it? He doesn’t know. Doesn’t want to speculate, isn’t here to talk about that. He’s telling us to be careful, to check our ambulances carefully. To police ourselves. This isn’t what we want to hear. Someone’s already been stuck, so no, we don’t want to hear that we can minimize our chance of exposure by showing up early and double-checking the truck. We want to hear that the fucker’s been caught, that he’s tied up outside for us to look at: Here he is, guys! Take a swing. Instead, someone has left a bag of piss needles in an ambulance, and we’re told to police ourselves. I can’t even answer the why of such a situation, let alone speculate on the who. “Okay,” he says, snapping off the overhead projector and slipping the photo back into a manila folder. “That’s all I have.”
We file out of the room and, despite our reservations, clock in. We grab our equipment and head out to the ramp. We enter our ambulances very, very slowly.
23
There’s Been a Prison Break
Still, I love it here. Forget the booby traps and anonymous terrorists, the plastic bags full of piss and needles. Grady is the only place I want to be. It’s nothing but history and controversy, and its medics—all those people who won’t speak to me—are the best around. I want desperately to earn their respect. I thought the shooting would do it—that maybe people would notice how I sped to the far end of town for a woman shot too many times at too close a range to be anything but an organ donor. How I stayed calm, did my job, and delivered her in better shape than I found her. But it was just one call among a hundred thousand, and I’m just one among two dozen new guys. Nobody noticed and nobody knows my name. Not the other medics and certainly not the director of operations.
Until now.
It’s dark outside, not even seven in the morning, and I’m standing before the director of EMS operations. She runs our department, and until this morning she’d had neither a reason nor the time to form an opinion of me. Now she’s considering my future. This isn’t good. It’s been three years since I got into EMS. In that time, I worked my way onto a 911 ambulance, graduated from paramedic school, and got hired at the only place I’ve ever wanted to work EMS. There are harder paths, but this one’s mine. Or was, anyway. It’s hard to say what’ll happen from here.
The director is stone-faced and serious, because the charges—and people are threatening charges—have gotten serious. She wants to know what in hell