A Quiet Crisis

Most of the calls paramedics receive aren’t life-or-death emergencies. They’re placed by vulnerable people who are lonely, living in poverty and need someone to care.

- Elizabeth Rosen

“I think it’s encephalitis,” she tells me. “Because it hurts back here, in my neck.” The woman motions to the back of her hairline, which is greyed and dry.

Susan* is 70 years old and called 911 today for a runny nose and some neck pain. She’s been sick for several days but hasn’t seen a doctor. She lives in a “single-room-occupancy” government-assistance high-rise downtown, where she shares a small room with a younger man she tells me is her friend. We’re in a crowded American coastal city, with ancient tenement-style hotels crammed next to new-money high-rises, condos and row houses. A tourist might walk an extra few blocks to avoid a neighbourhood like Susan’s.

She wears an oversized orange sweater and unravels one sleeve with her thumbs as we talk. The sweater isn’t as dirty as a lot of the clothes worn by the people we treat, but it’s not clean. I take Susan’s vital signs and hook her up to the cardiac monitor. I turn up the heat in the ambulance.

Susan is like most of my patients: lonely, destitute and nursing a minor medical complaint. I’ve worked on a 911 ambulance for five years in three different counties: urban and rural, rich and poor, wet and dry. My job isn’t really what people think it is.

On TV, paramedics are always rushing to try to save a woman crushed under a building, a man bleeding out or a baby taking its last breath. There are a lot of sirens, there is a lot of shouting, an occasional goofy drunk for comic relief, but the bulk of the job is invariably depicted as an adrenalin rush. Strangers’ eyes usually widen when I tell them what I do for a living.