out my final days in faded blue.
It isn’t just the uniform that makes me stand out. Of Grady’s two-hundred-plus employees, I’m one of the ten most senior medics on staff. That’s hard to even say. When I started at Grady, I was probably the least experienced medic on the streets. Nearly all of the people I knew and worked with when I started are gone—to other services, to nursing, to med school, to other fields. None of my longtime partners are here. One got hurt, two have been fired, and one quit. The people I looked up to are also gone. A few are supervisors now, the rest scattered in the wind. In the early days of Grady, Atlanta was a city on fire, and it took a different breed to work EMS. When I arrived, most of that first generation was gone, but their acolytes remained, and they passed down their style and approach to the rest of us.
By contrast, those beginning their career now have it a little easier. They’re serving a gentrified city and have never known the projects, all of which have been torn down. They don’t know the old ambulances or a life before our location was tracked by GPS. They’ve been hired by a hospital whose CEO refers to patients as customers, and they work out of a new building that doesn’t oblige them to walk past Grady’s lunatics on the way to a shift. By the time they arrived, we’d gotten our own fuel tanks, so they’ll never know what it’s like to drive an ambulance on stolen gas. I’m sure they’re good, but they’re brand-new, mostly, so they don’t know—yet—when and how to bend the rules.
In the end, I’m alone. I’m older than most of the new guys, more experienced and angrier, yes, but also more relaxed, more likely to smile when everything goes wrong, because I understand that sometimes things go wrong. Still, when I look around, I don’t see familiar faces. I see people who are young and eager and learning, doing all the things I did a decade ago with people who are long gone. I’ve become a relic.
I work the first two of my final three shifts with a guy just starting his career. My last week is his first. He’s twenty-three and clean-shaven. His boots are new. One of the first calls we run together is a bad asthmatic, always my favorite because it’s one of the truly life-threatening emergencies we can take from near-death to rebirth all on our own. There are a thousand tricks I’ve learned through experience, some common to medicine, some unique to a moving vehicle. Everything my rookie does is by the book, which is to say right on paper but wrong for the patient. People who can’t breathe feel an animal desire to have their feet on the ground, so I show him how to transport a patient sideways. I show him how to run the steroids through a drip, as opposed to slamming them directly into an IV, because slamming them causes the crotch to burn. I show him how to refill a nebulizer without disconnecting the oxygen. I tell him which questions to ask and how to ask them. I show him everything I know.
When the patient is breathing and able to talk, he nods to the new guy and tells him to listen to me because I know what I’m talking about. That can be said for a lot of people—really, any of the experienced medics we have—but what makes me unique is that I’m about to walk away. In a few days, all that knowledge will get locked away and, slowly, one piece at a time, disappear. From that moment on, I talk incessantly. I’m not sure how much he retains, but I’ve learned a lot over the years, and for it to simply vanish seems a waste. He’s skeptical, I can tell—the new ones always are—but whatever he keeps will serve him. I know that because I, too, was once brand-new and half-lost.
• • •
My last shift ended at five A.M. When we got back to Grady, I cleaned the ambulance and made sure it was restocked and ready for the next crew. Nobody was around when I went inside. There was no one to talk to, to say goodbye to, to notice I was leaving. I glanced around at the ambulances, the equipment, caught the smell of disinfectant, the low rumble of a diesel engine,