st patrick's day parade
Wednesday, March 19, 2008, 12:35 a.m.

anna and the dead
Wednesday, November 14, 2007, 11:39 a.m.

On a warm September day, Anna and I worked a pretty unremarkable shift. A bunch of routine jobs. Anna, a 22-year-old Polish girl with waist-length dreads, known for her ability to voice her opinion, was having a bad day. She grumbled and got more acidic with each job. Anna has days like this -- being her partner for six months has taught me this much. Responding to our jobs that day, she would read the dispatch text and loudly complain to the monitor bolted to our center console. She was a big ball of stress, tightly wound.

"Why would you call 911 for this!"
"She better not be fat"
"There better be an elevator."

Our fourth call of the day was an "Unknown Condition" in a first floor apartment on Washington Avenue. There was nothing in the call text, but Anna was still grumbling. "I was just about to EAT!"

We pulled up and saw a man standing in front of the apartment building. He had called 911.

"Today, my cousin came to visit and asked me if someone had died in my building."

I replied, "That's kind of a strange question to ask."

"It's because of the smell from my neighbor's apartment. He's an old man. A sick man."

"GREAT! Another dinner RUINED!", Anna said.

The man showed us to a door in the first floor hallway with its dark red paint chipping off. A small crowd amassed on the sidewalk, curiously peering in the open front door. Anna and I take a few whiffs in the hallway and knowingly nod to each other. The corpse smell faintly drifted out from under the door and into our noses. There was no mistaking it. I knocked on the door a few times, mostly for show.

"EMS! . . . Fire Department! . . . Anybody home?" I waited for a long silent pause and then radioed for an engine company to come a break open the door.

Anna continued to complain, "Now we have to wait in this stench." She began to pace.

"Try and relax Anna", I said. "These are the easiest jobs. All we have to do is wait for Fire to open the door and then do paperwork. No lifting. Easy."

"Yeah, but this smells is going to stay with me, in my clothes, in my hair. What if I want to eat? I can't!"

"Sure you can, its easy! We'll go to White Castle."

By now, three neighbors came downstairs and waited with us in the hall, watching our conversation. I knocked on the door one more time. Silence. I tried twisting the knob. To our surprise, the door groaned open a few inches before being stopped by a chain.

Our eyes grew wide. "Holy Shit! It was open this whole time!", Anna said.

The smell now poured into the hallway. Most of the neighbors went outside to breathe. It was just me, Anna, and a man from 3R. I pushed on the door a few times hearing it rest against the chain. The chain was flimsy and old. I gave one hard shove, and the door swung completely open.

"HELLO! FIRE DEPARTMENT! ANYBODY HOME?", I yelled from the doorway. I was dreading being the first to enter this apartment. I turned and glanced at the man from 3R, he looked like he wanted to go in. I motioned for him to enter, but he shook his head.

The apartment was very dark, with bits of sunlight coming through the sepia-toned shades. I gingerly stepped in and found a working light switch. I was petrified. Anna stepped right behind me. There was trash everywhere. Old appliances, dirty clothes, cookware, bowls of half-eaten rotted food, a few roaches creeping about. Anna and I took a visual catalog of the room. We found the corpse in a dark corner of the room, lying prone between a stack of newspapers and the crumbling plaster wall. He was a fat man easily mistaken for a pile of laundry.

This call didn't seem to cheer my partner up. Neither did any of the other six calls we did that day. She went home angry and stressed, dreading her unstable domestic life. I later learned that she had a small stroke that night and had to be taken to Lutheran Hospital.

hobbies
Friday, October 19, 2007, 05:47 p.m.

Sometimes I wonder if I have a life outside of my work. I love my job, so much so that I spend time also volunteering as an EMT in my neighborhood. But, most normal people have hobbies that is not work. Occasionally, people ask, "What are your hobbies?" or "What do you like to do?" I'm not sure how to answer without sounding like a nut.

"I like to ride in the back of a truck and listen to people endlessly discuss their problems."

"I like to carry people."

"I like to find corpses."

"I like to clean blood and vomit and piss and shit."

I used to swim. It was a high school sport that carried somewhat into college. I became an officer of my college swim club, and went to practice three times a week... all that came to an abrupt end after school. Now I'm not sure if I can actually go 200 yards without stopping.

I used ride my bicycle a lot. I was a bicycle messenger for a summer in Philadelphia. Logging hundreds of miles a week, crisscrossing the city in endless deliveries. I also used to work in Bushwick, with at least an hour commute every day on bike. I looked forward to the long commutes on nice autumn days. Now I ride my bicycle eight minutes each way to and from work. I suppose I can just ride around the city for fun... but I feel silly. Kinda like riding the subway without a destination, just for the fun of the ride.

I guess my newest outside-of-work hobby is photography. I bought an expensive used digital SLR camera a few months ago, and am just getting comfortable using it. Artistic expression is tough. I sometimes read past entries of this journal and cringe. Did I really write that? Maybe if I write enough in volume, there will be some good things, maybe five percent, that I can be proud of. I feel the same way about my camera now. Maybe if I take enough pictures of enough things, there will be lots of crappy shots, some good shots, and one or two great ones.

do or die
Wednesday, October 17, 2007, 11:16 a.m.

We ran routine Medicaid taxi jobs all night. It was 10pm, we just brought an old lady in chronic hip pain to Kings County Hospital. Two gunshot victims get wheeled in behind us. More shootings were coming up over our radios.

I turned to my new partner, Brent, and said, "Lets get outta here and go pick up some of these shots. Bed-Stuy Do-or-Die!"

Brent was as excited as I was. We jumped into our ambulance and roared northward into Bed Stuy. We hear another shooting get sent to our neighboring unit, 57-Adam. We get sent to a low-priority job in Bed-Stuy.

This job had been on the board for twenty minutes before we got it due to a shortage of units. We arrived to find a man laying head-down on the front steps to his apartment. Blood oozing from the back of his head, he was gasping for breath. He stopped breathing and his heart stopped beating once we got him in the back of our ambulance. Brent began CPR. I was instructed to "Drive! Drive! Drive!"

I hopped in the front and gassed it towards the closest receiving. I told the dispatcher to notify Interfaith hospital of our arrival. Interfaith did not get the message, and they were really unprepared to handle a code. With the help of other EMTs in the ambulance bay, we took the patient in to their resuscitation room, moved him onto the bed, and continued CPR for five minutes before anyone showed up. The man was pronounced dead shortly thereafter.

This call was pretty bad. Last time Brent and I worked together, we had a man with three gunshot wounds - also pretty bad. Brent is calling me a curse.

wedding
Monday, September 3, 2007, 11:30 a.m.

I had a nightmare last night that it was our wedding day and we were completely unprepared. There was no emcee, no music and no officiant. All our friends were really bored and Genevieve's Barnard friends were angry that we couldn't get "really married". Somehow, I thought they would feel cheated. I shouldn't be stressed... this thing is more than a year away.

blip
Tuesday, May 29, 2007, 12:51 p.m.

I worked a double shift yesterday, staying on the bus until 7am. It was a busy night, with back-to-back calls that have been holding on the board. At 3:30am, my partner and I went to a cardiac arrest in a 4th floor apartment of the Gowanus Projects. We initiated CPR while the medics began pushing drugs and hooking him up to the monitor. He was asystole... flatline. The wife told us he was down for 20 minutes. We continued pumping away.

After 15 minutes of CPR, we begin to feel a thready pulse on the carotid. Little crests start appearing on the monitor. The pulse gets stronger and more regular. Soon enough we can take a blood pressure on his arm. He didn't wake up, didn't start breathing, but his heart beat strong. We carry him downstairs on a scoop stretcher and take him over to the closest hospital.

It was my first CPR save.

engagement
Sunday, May 27, 2007, 12:01 p.m.

On Wednesday, May 9th, 2007. I asked Genevieve to marry me in front of her favorite neighborhood sushi place on Smith Street . I succeeded in surprising her. She said yes.

new battalion
Monday, May 7, 2007, 11:02 p.m.

I somehow feel like my life is suddenly changing. A random convergence of events have unfolded in very quick succession, and will only continue at this insane pace for the next month.

My job has drastically changed, with the last two weeks in EVOC - Emergency Vehicle Operator's Course... I can now drive the ambulance. My transfer request came through and I moved to Battalion 32 in Sunny Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. I now have two new partners and a new work schedule at night. My new unit, 48-Boy, sits in picturesque Grand Army Plaza, a much prettier CSL than dreary Pratt University. I feel like my job has now completely changed.

Genevieve is finishing her finals soon (by Wednesday), and will soon be studying for her bar exam.

I last worked a double shift from 3pm until 6am, with the later half in Williamsburg. The entire day was pretty low key, with routine calls - not all were medical in nature:

- an older lady with abdominal pain,
- a misbehaving autistic daughter,
- a cabbie punched in the face,
- a hipster sideswiped by cab,
- a hipster with toothache,
- a disorderly prisoner,
- an angry tenant,
- and finally, at 4am, the lady who drank too much amaretto and passed out in the bathroom breaking her ankle and injuring her neck in the process. We had to place her on a longboard and carry her into the elevator and finally out to the bus. It was an ordeal that was thoroughly awful.

wild cavies
Sunday, March 11, 2007, 10:41 a.m.

Genevieve and I went to the Bronx Zoo yesterday. It seems that everyone in New York I talk to has been to the Bronx Zoo at least once before, but not anytime recent. I remember middle school trips out to see the tigers and have scheduled lunches in the Asia Pavilion. Genevieve remembers her experience going with a gaggle of Barnard freshman, and leaving the zoo alone.

Visiting the zoo in the winter is great, with no crowds and fewer annoying kids. There were mostly couples and young families... the occasional group of too-obnoxious teens would pass and show apparently very little interest in animals, and more appreciation for their own Korn-playing cell phones. Sometimes, I felt bad for the animals at the zoo, having to endure getting yelled at all day by kids and some idiotic adults.

The best exhibition house was the mouse house. With cases and cases of rodents on display. There we found something we thought we'd never see... the wild cavy... a wild form of guinea pig found in South America. They were very active, slim and were all a uniform dark brown color. They were very dissimilar to our fat, colorful pigs.

ruthies
Sunday, February 25, 2007, 07:53 a.m.

My unit, when its not on a job, sits near Pratt Campus on Myrtle Avenue. We spend a lot of time sitting... probably about half of this job involves sitting and waiting for a call. Our official Cross Street Location (or CSL) is on Myrtle and Washington Avenues -- with the ability to float around anywhere within a 3-block radius and still be marked as sitting at the CSL. My partners like the little quiet corner just outside the Pratt gate at Emerson Pl and Willoughby Ave. This is where nobody will bother us... nobody will flag us down, and we can sleep in peace.

I've been flagged by people on Myrtle avenue three times so far, in my two months on this unit. One was for a guy hit while riding his bicycle on Myrtle and Emerson, another was for a rolled-over SUV on Myrtle and Classon, and a third was a family that drove up with their sick baby. I don't like getting flagged... there's no time to prepare, no time to start the paperwork, and sometimes no time to put on gloves before people start yelling at you.

Recently, I've been bringing Genevieve's laptop to work, giving me internet access... something I thought was impossible on this job. I've also found a spot with free wifi - Ruthie's Restaurant of Brooklyn. It's a soul food spot right next to Pratt on Myrtle and Emerson. My partner tells me that we're playing with fire sitting on Myrtle Avenue, but I don't care... I have youtube.

arrest at atlantic - pacific
Saturday, February 17, 2007, 08:45 a.m.

Yesterday was a very hectic day. We did six transports in eight hours, with a two-hour-long cardiac arrest in the morning.

At 7am, our first call of the day was a sick job on the N train at Atlantic Avenue station. My partner Kathleen and I went down to the N platform and elbowed our way through the morning rush crowd to find that there was no patient anywhere to be found. We were going to mark it as unfounded.

On our way back up to the surface, a transit officer got us and told us that somebody was very sick on the Q train - the opposite end of the station.
"How sick?", we ask.
"I dunno, but he's not breathing."
"OK, thats not good."

We snaked our way though more people to the Q platform to find a stopped Q train. We went into the train to find an engine company, a paramedic unit, and a throng of commuters crowded around a big guy in arrest. We perform CPR on him, and the medics deliver a set of shocks to try and get him back. A thready pulse appears and disappears. We continue CPR.

About 15 minutes into the code, transit workers inform us that they will have to move our train halfway down the platform so they can evacuate the stuck train behind us. After another shock, we give the OK. It is a very eerie feeling when the entire scene started rolling, the all-too-familiar sounds and rocking of the train accompanied with working a code. Two things that were completely foreign to each other beforehand.

We eventually got the 250lb patient onto a scoop stretcher, picked him up with the help of firefighters, and pushed through the crowds of rush hour commuters. At this point it was 8:30, the height of the rush. We wound up taking an elevator up to the mezzanine, pushing past more people to another tiny elevator which took us up to the 2,3 platform, a trip down another platform and out the turnstile gate to a final scummy elevator up to the surface. All along, we were performing CPR.

With each compression, gastric juices and general brownish bodily fluids would come out of his mouth... producing a delightful smell of vomit in the early morning. We got him to Brooklyn Hospital where the doctor pronounced him shortly afterwards.

This was our first of six jobs yesterday.

doc in a box
Monday, January 29, 2007, 04:30 p.m.

I got off work today, and I'm looking forward to two days off. This afternoon is the beginning of my weekend.

Having days off work on arbitrary weekdays is great. There is no sense of obligation to go out with friends or do something worthwhile with your time... everyone else is at work. Also, there is so much more in the way of getting things done that you can accomplish on a weekday than any given weekend. I can see a dentist or open a checking account without hassle.

Two days ago, I had my first newborn baby. He was 3 hours old by the time we got to the house. The baby was a healthy boy. The mother gave birth to him in the house with a midwife present. My partner and a paramedic took the baby to the hospital, while I stayed behind with another medic and tried to convince the mother to also come to the hospital to get evaluated. There was no budging. The call took forever, with the process of refusal taking at least half-an-hour on the phone with our medical control doctor.

On-line medical control, also known as Telemetry, is a doctor who sits at a desk in headquarters and makes decisions all day on whether patients can refuse transport or not. "Doc in a box". I have had the opportunity to call telemetry four times this week. Each time more tedious than the last. They ask you hundreds of questions about the patient and about your assessment. They put you on hold for at least 10 or 20 minutes every time you call. Once its all done, doc in a box can order a patient to go and get the police to forcibly remove him. All from the comfort of a heated, non-urine smelling, office.

25th birthday
Tuesday, January 23, 2007, 10:07 a.m.

I turned 25 on Saturday. Genevieve threw me a party at our apartment and a few of my friends came over to celebrate the occasion. Genevieve made me a delicious chocolate cake (pictured on left) and we had birthday-related booze. I wound up drinking enough to turn red, but I held my fortitude. Eugene came over and brought a bottle of vodka in true Russian form. It was good times.

The next day we had to wake up early to meet my mom for lunch at a gigantic Chinese buffet in Flushing, Queens. East Buffet never fails to satisfy my every Asian culinary desire. This was also the official handover of my lent Volvo over to my Mother. I had borrowed her sedan since October to drive to FDNY Academy out in Bayside, Queens. We took the Volvo to a Chinese auto auction lot in Flushing where a dealer promised to auction the car and give the proceeds to my mom.

On Sunday morning, I woke up before the sun rose and rode my bicycle a chilly three miles to work.

pizza hut buffet
Tuesday, January 23, 2007, 09:17 a.m.

Genevieve and I made a trip out to the Pizza Hut buffet (forever known as PHB) today. Finding an actual Pizza Hut in New York City is a challenge in itself, and a PHB is even tougher… a challenge we readily embrace. As you may know, most urban pizza huts are not at all like their suburban counterparts. They used to be called “Pizza Hut Express”, but now they’re simply (and falsely) called “Pizza Hut”. They can be found everywhere in the city: malls, office buildings, gas stations, subway stations, inside Taco Bells. They serve a variety of inferior (and sometimes stale) personal pan pizzas along with too-moist breadsticks. There is no server, no seating, no salad bar, and most importantly, no PHB.

After some research, we discovered a sit-down pizza hut out in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn. It was accessible to mass transit. On a weekday last year, we took the L train to the last stop, and then took the Rockaway Parkway bus to the end and found this Pizza Hut in a strip mall. The place had seating, but to our utter dismay, no buffet.

Months later, and after some more research, another occasion arises for a buffet. PHB is only served for lunch on weekdays, making the experience even more scare for working city dwellers like us. Genevieve and I both had the day off, and we venture out again to a Pizza Hut I drove past once in Staten Island, at a strip mall on Hyland Blvd. This time, we took the R train down to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where we caught a city bus that took us over the Verazzano and down Hyland Blvd to our greasy destination: PHB. The Pizza Hut was actually not attached to the strip mall, but in the middle of the parking lot, like a red-roofed temple among a sea of automobiles. There was a banner out front that proclaimed “LUNCH BUFFET.” We had found our mecca.