I am expecting to walk into a horror movie and see a zombie hulk smoking a cigarette with half his head missing and brain and blood covering his shirt.

So we stretched and limbered up and loosened, and then we took our positions. Knees bent. One two three.

The older I get the easier it becomes to just do what they want you to do. There is usually a good reason behind it.

You drive the streets of the city or towns where you work and you go by houses, intersections, businesses where you have done calls. The longer you are at it, the more memory pins are dropped on your street map.

We’re called for a child not breathing. The address is a convalescent home. It makes no sense. Then we pull up. There is a car parked askance by the entrance, two front doors and a back door open. The engine still running. In the front lobby two nurses and a police officer kneel over a […]

Today, at the hospital, I put my stretcher in the back of my old suburban ambulance by mistake.

“He ate diner here like he does every night, steak, eggs and toast. He was his normal self, polite, small talk. He walked out to the car, and then we noticed he was still out here, so we come out to see if he was okay.”

The days of handing a laryngyscope to a new paramedic and telling him to go out and not kill anyone need to come to an end.

If you work commercial ambulance in a high volume system, and if one of you is a paramedic and one an EMT (the standard in our system), you and your partner are going to need to work out a way of dividing up the calls.