A Thousand Naked Strangers (28 page)

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, all the things that had been such a part of my life but now weren't, and I clocked out. By the time I got home, I couldn't remember a single call that I'd run that night.

In the end, I wasn't fired. I never fucked up and got drummed out or got angry and stomped off. I never got hurt and ended up in a lingering worker's comp suit, never got promoted up and out of the ambulance. I never even really quit. I went from full-time to part-time to sometimes. My departure went unnoticed and unheralded. In the end, I didn't die—I just faded away.

I
t's over now.

The ambulance, the partners, the patients, the madness—it's all just a memory. So much has changed, and yet here I am, right back at the beginning. People who meet me now, who didn't know me as a medic, ask what it was like. They ask how many times I've seen the dead, how many children I've delivered. They want to know if I ever threw up or got scared or panicked. They ask about the worst thing I saw and whether it was hard to treat kids. They ask how I got into it. They ask everything, but never once why I stayed. It's as if that original decision to join explained why, a decade later, I was still hanging around. But it didn't. Whatever I thought way back in the beginning, whatever it was that got me hooked, those plans, those hopes, those romantic ideals, didn't survive. Righteous as they might have been, true as they might have been, they couldn't outlast the reality of life on an ambulance: the hours, the pay, the constant threat of injury, the shitholes and the shitbags and the fact that no one not wearing that uniform will ever understand what it is we do.

In the beginning, it was all sirens and heroes and saving lives. A few years later, I hated the sound of sirens. I'd saved lives but
never enough, and I'd done heroic things, though never once did I feel like a hero. So why stay?

From that very first night of EMT school, through every shift I ever ran, all the way to the end and as I think back on it now, the question has always been the same:
Why am I here?
It's a complicated question with a simple answer, though it took quitting and walking away before I could see it. People said I'd miss it when I left, that there'd be a hole, a void, hard to describe and harder to fill. They said I'd feel it every day, that quite possibly I'd drift back. There was reason to believe. I've seen plenty of people with no plan B—people raised in an ambulance who knew nothing else—get burned out and leave, only to come back to the one place they've ever felt at home.

Those who return are labeled retreads. Asked to explain why they're back, they'd say it was because they missed the medicine: the IVs and the drugs, the competence, and the unquestioned confidence they earned through years of experience that did them no good anywhere else. Turns out in the real world, you don't get to snake a breathing tube down a dying woman's throat. When you have a regular job, no one gets shot dead in the clay or has back-to-back seizures in the county jail. No one hands you their limp child and places not only their trust but their entire world in your hands. Which is too bad. There's a strange exhilaration not just in having done those things and done them well but in knowing that eventually you'll be called on to do them again.

Still, that's not what I miss. Frankly, I'm not sure that's what anyone misses. Yes, the medicine is the draw, but it's not the show. Everyone who sticks around and anyone who's ever left and considered a comeback knows that there are better
places—and better money—in almost any other aspect of the medical field. So why stay? Because the modern world is orderly and practical. The sun goes up, the sun goes down, bills are due, the carpool line starts over there. But it's not so for everyone, and once I realized that, it was hard to walk away. Today, not far from where I'm sitting, the universe will slip a gear and all hell will break loose. Somewhere there's an ambulance crew who knows it. And they're waiting.

So yes, the medicine is great, but you can keep it. I miss the madness. I miss being out at night, running through streets alive with the dead and dying, the drunk, the crazy, the angry, those in need, and those who only think they are. I miss the distant pop of a pistol and the long fading howl of a dealer who's spotted a cop. I miss fighting meth heads in seedy motels, I miss the crack houses and flophouses, the chaos of a shooting scene. I miss the projects after dark. I miss the sense of duty, of honor, of humor, the sense of having lost myself somewhere, somehow, in a very strange world. I even miss the fear of mistakes. Whatever it was that brought us here, it's everything else that kept us around.

People like to say it takes a certain type of person to do this job, a special person. They're probably right, just not in the way they think. Medics don't have to be heroic or tough or even good people. They simply have to enjoy the madness. The normal reaction to gunshots or screaming or house fires or someone collapsing in a messy heap is to get away, to back off, not necessarily to ignore it, perhaps, but not to stumble in half-cocked. And really—aside from a driver's license and a high school diploma—that's what this job takes. A willingness to walk in unprotected when we clearly should walk away. A desire to take part but just as often to bear witness.

So why are medics here? Because panic and death, near death, even your own, is a peculiar drug, and whether or not it's what the injured and the sick and the desperate want to hear, the people who show up do so because they like it. Disasters, even the small ones, mean freedom. Freedom to bend the rules, break the rules, disregard the rules. Maybe I don't even know the rules, just make them up as I go along. The people who stay are the ones who like those moments and all that comes with them, even the hard parts.

Someday it'll be my turn. A call will be placed, an alarm will sound, an ambulance will shudder to life. Six minutes later, weather and distance permitting, two medics will walk through my door. Experience has taught me what they'll find, how they'll react, the things they'll consider when deciding whether or not to save me. That much, at least, is preordained.

And this crew, the one who shows up for my death, will be there for the same reason I hoped to show up for yours.

Because it's fun.

T
o Pepe—for correctly choosing my room out of 250; for convincing me that I could actually make a living as a writer; for believing in me and insisting that I quit my job and start over; for getting nervous but not angry when I got us lost in China; for continuing the fight in 2010 by having our beautiful family; for being there and leading the way; and for having unshakable faith in a man whom the world hadn't yet deemed worthy. It's not enough to say thank you, but there you have it. I love you.

I owe a great debt to Alice Martell. You believed in this book from the moment it came through your door, and you've provided nothing but support and clear guidance. You made this dream a reality. And to Rick Horgan, who understood what I was trying to do from the start. This would not be the book it is without your expert help.

Dan and Jon, who loved the madness as much as I did, and Ciaravella, who encouraged me to write it all down: I'm obliged. To the rest of my EMS family, I consider it a great honor to have served alongside you. Over the years, I routinely found myself, despite the blood and the screaming—and the foul odors—in awe of your courage and dedication. Be safe.

© LAUREN PRESSEY

K
evin Hazzard served as a paramedic in Atlanta for ten years. Since graduating from The Citadel, he's also worked as both reporter and paperboy. He lives in Hermosa Beach, California, with his wife and their two children, where he writes for television. This is his second book.

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