March 8, 2022 • 26 mins
First responders like EMS professionals are often on the receiving end of the calls we wish we didn’t have to make when an emergency hits. A job that not only sees emergencies but also the beginning of new lives, EMS responders support medical transitions of all kinds. Anthony Almojera has witnessed the full spectrum of these medical calls throughout his time as an EMS paramedic in New York City, a job that was greatly amplified when the pandemic hit. As the vice president for Union Local 3621 and an FDNY EMS Lieutenant, Anthony is also a mental healthcare advocate and support system for his fellow EMS professionals.
Learn more about: EMS FDNY Help Fund (https://emsfdnyhelpfund.com/)
Learn more about Anthony Almojera (https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/Riding-the-Lightning/9780358652878)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, Mr Heym, Welcome back everyone to Essential Voices. This
week's story is very near and dear to my heart
and brings us back to the early days of the pandemic.
It's hard for us to mentally go back there when
we were all so scared and ensured of what was
going on. And I remember checking the numbers frantically to
(00:22):
see how full the hospitals were around me, and of
course I watched as the death toll cryptopping up. I
also had a personal connection with all of this because
my dad got COVID and with his previous health conditions,
we had so many concerns and as a family, you know,
we were worried about what might happen to him. We
(00:43):
were a very lucky family that he made it through
his bout of COVID. But I have expert medical professionals,
so thank for him still being with us today. So
that's why I was incredibly moved and humble by our
Essential Voice Anthony and he's honesty in talking about his
experience with all of this. So kick what we got
(01:05):
on there today Today we're going to hear from Essential
Worker Anthony and Mohea. Anthony's an E M S. First
responder in New York City, and to me, he epitomizes
the heart and soul of first responders, and he paints
a grim picture of the realities that he and his
team were dealing with during the darkest moments of the pandemic.
While hunker down indoors, those fortunate enough not to be
(01:28):
on the front lines heard horror stories from folks like Anthony,
and we were humbled that he shared his story with us.
We owe a lot to first responders like Anthony, and
not only did he share about all the influx of
emergency calls he responded to throughout the pandemic, but also
about the severe toll the pandemic took on e m
S workers and mental health. Anthony is a union leader
and an e m S lieutenant, and so he took
(01:50):
care of his own mental and physical health while also
taking care of his colleagues. Anthony shares this hardest service
that we've seen from all our essential workers on the show,
and he's always thinking about his community and about what
improvements he wants to see in the city's treatment of
fellow e m S workers. And next week we'll have
a roundtable conversation with Grief expert psychotherapists and hosts of
the podcast here after Megan Divine and a note to listeners,
(02:14):
this episode deals with mentions of suicide, so keep that
in mind in deciding where and when to listen. Anthony's
story starts right now. Thank you, Anthony. I'm so happy
to have this conversation with you. Um you're in e
M S right you men telling us a little bit
about what that it means. Yes, it's a noble profession.
(02:34):
E M S stands for Emergency Medical Service, So we're
the ones that operate and staff the ambulance as you
see running by you streets every day. What was your
first day like when you first enter the world. So
my first day in the fire department was the first
day of the streets. I had to go to the academy.
Now I have been in the E M T for
(02:56):
a couple of years before that doing medical transport. But
the first day and no one one was April ten,
two thousand and four, and my first job on the
streets up in Harlem. I got sent to Harlem. When
I came out of the academy was I had a
seven car m V a motor vehicle accident on Lennox
(03:16):
Avenue and one of the cars I flipped over the
media and was laying upside down on the other side,
and I had a baby in a car seat that
was trapped. My first job. So I get running out.
I'm all nervous, you know. I'm like, oh, you know
what's crazy? And there's all these people and we have
all these ambulances and cops and the firefighters are ripping
(03:37):
open the door and I'm inside trying to control bleeding
on people. And we get them all to the hospital.
And I came out of the hospital, Harlem Hospital, and
I was hooked. That adrenaline pump. There's nothing like it.
The magic of this job and the real high when
you go to a call and they're not breathing or
(03:57):
talking and then all of a sudden they get to
the hospital because of your interventions, they're breathing and talking.
That's powerful, man. That's something where you feel the energy
the universe just kind of float. That's kind of what
makes you passionate. Right, It's just the calling. Right, You've
got a phone call from above and tells you this
is your moment to show up. And when you do,
(04:19):
these things slow down, Like, how do you see it,
how do you organize your thoughts in that moment. You
would think that everything would speed up in those moments,
right you get there, somebody's yelling, somebody's doing this, somebody's
having a baby, whatever it is. But really some of
this is training that e M t s and medics
have to learn how to process and then start picking
(04:40):
apart what's important and what's not. And then some of
it is just innatibility, right, because I've worked with people
who don't last on this job. They come on, you know,
after six months they realize it's not for them. They
ain't got it. And the rest of us, while it
does have a psychological impact what we see, just for
your own knowledge, E M S workers have the highest
rates of suicides amongst novel one providers. So it's not
(05:03):
like we see things and then we're able to let
it go. Some of us, it follows us. I myself,
I have had my own suicidal ideations when you get there, though,
even if the outcome is not good, what I feel
is I was blessed for lack of a better world
or fortunate enough to even comfort to living. We're not
(05:24):
always successful. People do die, but everything slows down and
you're able to pick a part in process and do
your job where you're doing it with outside. If you
were looking at me, I'm moving like that. I'm intebating you.
I'm getting you on the e k G. I'm starting
(05:45):
in I V. My partner and I are doing that
in minutes. But for me, it feels like ours. It
feels like ours because I have all the time in
the world because you're just moving. You know, basketball players,
so you gotta move without the ball, right, and that's
what we're doing. Right. If my partner and I we
don't even really speak to each other on the call,
(06:05):
we just know. It's almost it's like, it's just here's
the I V. Here's the medication. What's going on. Okay,
let's get so yeah, and then when it doesn't go well,
because when it goes well, we all get to celebrate. Right,
we won the championship. You weren't asthmatic, you weren't breathing.
You're breathing. We deliver a baby. Here you go, here's
your kid. You know I've delivered sixteen. Not one has
(06:26):
been named Anthony. I'm a little upset. You know, it's
the least you know the nickname something, give me something.
But but when it goes bad, right when somebody dies
because they have a disease we can't fix. But we
didn't get there in time. Well there's injuries or two
too great. We also get to celebrate the life, you know,
(06:47):
we get to sit there with the family and have
a moment of what I call a grief transfer, you know,
because I have to, I have to kind of unload
all that because I failed. Even though there's some extenuation certy,
I still take it as a fairly But I sit
there with family and they look at me and they say,
thank you. Do you know what it's like to have
somebody die? And the family member goes thank you. That
(07:08):
means they saw what my part and I would do it.
They saw all the efforts given, and they're thankful that
somebody else cared about their family as if it was
their own. And that's what it feels like. You know,
things slowed down. You become a part of the family.
The stranger is now my family, and you really feel like,
you know, you're celebrating your life even if even if
(07:30):
that person dies, you're celebrating their life with them. We'll
be right back after this break Welcome back to Essential Voices.
Thank you for sharing that. Anthony, Like, you've got to
think about how well rounded you have to be too.
Answered a call right because it could be anything. And
then all of a sudden you get introduced to a pandemic.
(07:51):
What was that like for you? I think about what
an adventures and rewarding road you've taken, and then you
get introduced to one of the areous times in the
moment of our generation. What was that like? I mean,
what were those conversations? Like? How did it all, you know,
evolve for you? So we knew what pandemic was coming,
we didn't know the extent or how it would hit.
(08:12):
You know, we've been lucky in the past. We've had
some patients. You know, we had the Bowl of Patient,
the first thing Bowl of Patient United States was treated
by the five Department paramedic. We had h one n
one stars, but we didn't get punched in the face.
And then we're hearing this thing and then we start
seeing some patients and we're like, we'll be all right,
We'll be all right. And then around March nineteen March
twentieth last year was like a bomb hit normally e
(08:36):
MS in New York City does four thousand runs a day.
It went to sixty hundred, seven thousand runs a day.
There's only about forty one undred of us, and we
were running all over the city. Will Up until that point,
I always thought, because of the way I was brought up,
because of some of my lifestyle practices and the experience
(08:58):
of this job, that had unlimited supply of empathy. But
the pandemic showed me it was I did not. I
was going to calls that you feel like you can
save them, thirty five year old people who couldn't breathe.
They're talking to you by Tom again to the ambulance.
They went to cardiac arrest. We couldn't get him back.
We saw people die at a crazy clip. In one
(09:22):
sixteen hours shift for me, I had thirteen cardiac arrest,
thirteen people that we couldn't get back. It wasn't just me,
the medics and E. M. T. S. I was never
more proud of them, but I was also scared for
them because they saw so much death, so much suffering.
And then what really brought it home was we started
(09:44):
to get sick. At one time, the workforce was outsick.
So he took a workforce at four thousand. He made
it three thousand. I didn't get sick. I watched a
lot of people get sick around me. To this day,
I've had ten medics and the mt s passed away
from COVID. I've also had four of them commit suicide.
(10:05):
And I still have a whole slew of others that
still have not been back to work because of COVID,
because of COVID longhaulers or other medical issues that arose
from it. How it affected me because I'm the vice
president of my union, so a lot of people were
calling me. You know, I'm fighting with management to get
his more supplies, and people are really kind of confiding
(10:27):
in me. And I started the struggle with my own things,
and you know, I felt suicidal myself earlier this year
is when it all hit me, and I really felt
like I was bottoming out. Thankfully, I have friends and
and and other resources I could tap into. But there
was a moment when I had no hope. In February,
I was like, that's it. I'm done. And I had
(10:50):
started to go through the machinations of killing myself, you know,
which has always been the scary part. You know, you
read about that that I've had patients like that where
they can and see the angles anymore, and so they
start to do the planning. As long as you could
see the angles, you can see the hope, you see
a light around the corner. But then then no, I
(11:12):
really felt that for the first time in my life.
So the process all of this while this is happening,
and then you're seeing what the government's doing, which is nothing.
You're seeing supplies run out, You're seeing people get into
fights because they don't want to wear a mask. I
was kind of hoping this was a moment that you know,
we would look at each other as Americans and be like, yeah,
(11:32):
we're in this together. I mean, you were here, you
saw what happened. There was and there were wonderful people
during it. The actor Jeffrey Wright hooked up with us.
He fed us every day, which was big. We had
people come into the station and saying, hey, you know,
we just want to check on you. That was nice.
We saw a lot of individual moments of beauty, but
(11:54):
I never saw e m s handled that. You know,
in the past, we maybe get one day sanity the
hurricane or at nine eleven event, you know, you get
the surge and then it dies. This went on for weeks.
Did you feel like the infrastructure in New York was
supporting you, guys? Say in day out, you know, it
(12:15):
seems like, you know, you guys were taking on a lot.
New York City individuals and communities were really there for us,
the City of New York itself as far as management, No,
they were. The fire department has been mismanaged for years.
The short staffing we've been warning them about because e M.
(12:35):
S workers when not when one workers right when you
call now on one do you have cops, firefighters, c ms.
But for some reason E M. S workers, they want
to pay thirty five thousand dollars less. They won't give
him the same pay and benefits. So right now, at
the height of the pandemic of my workforce had less
than five years experience. That's not how you run a
(12:55):
nine one agency. And then about two and a half
weeks into the height of the pandemic, we're being told
of running out of the end ninety five mask. We're
starting to use gowns that are made of plastic, like
you know, the school lunch ladies used to have. We're
starting to get the threat of We're not gonna be
able to respond to calls because I can't help you
if I'm sacrificing my own health right and the mayor,
(13:18):
you know, the mayor of New York City let us down.
I think he still continues to let us down. He
came out with statements EMS work is different. When he
was asked, should we take care of the EMS workers? Oh,
we'll get to it. He wants to have a parade
for us now essential workers, and that rings hollow. You know,
it's like let the meat cake. You know, we'll be
(13:40):
right back after this break, welcome back to Essential voices.
It makes me really sad, man, It makes me. It
makes me feel really really sad to know that on
a local level, on a neighborhood level, I was sat
in a community level. We have to come up with
our own solutions. Um, when we show up in elect leadership.
(14:03):
That's it's meant to understand what it's like to be
you and your neighborhood. You know, do you mind sharing
a little bit more about your work with the union
and what steps are you guys taking and you know
what where you guys are in this conversation. So yeah,
I'm the vice president of the f t n Y
E M S Officers Union. That's the lieutenants and captains
(14:25):
were all paramedics and UH. For years, we've been trying
to fight for e MS, what we call E M
S parody with the other nine one one agencies, police
and fire. And right now as I'm talking to you,
I'm taking a break, but we're negotiations with the city
and they're fighting us for everything. I think we're gonna
get a contract. It's gonna be a nice raise, but
(14:45):
a lot of it is funded through givebacks that we're doing.
But you know, we supported a mayor who I think
is gonna win, who promised us parody. You know what
I said to him on the campaign trail was e
MS has been wandering the desert for forty years. Bring
us home. So from a union perspective, what I want
to do is because I know how hard we work
(15:08):
and how essential we are, I want to make sure
that E M S workers only have to work one job.
Right now, I work with E M t s and
medics who work three jobs. I work three jobs. You
shouldn't as a paramedic in this city, in the busiest
E M S service in the world. You should not
have to work three jobs. When I have to work
(15:29):
three jobs. You know who loses out you, you're the citizen.
I'm not focused on this job like I should be.
I'm not available for this job like I should be.
I'm not happy at home because I don't get to
see you know, I'm not married, but you know I
won't get to see my wife and kids. I'm not
happy because I can't go out. I'm constantly working. If
(15:50):
people really want to get involved, so that union leaders
can really give the public what they deserve as a dedicated,
paid em mess workforce. This should not be a volunteered thing.
God blessed the people that volunteered to do this. But
you should not have to wake up somebody at three
in the morning from their bed to come in and
(16:10):
help you because you have a heart attack. You know.
It should be a national service like in other countries.
We should be paid accordingly so that we can live
in the cities we work with. I worked with guys
who drive uber during the pandemic. I had an e
M T at my station that would finish working crazy
hours and then he went and worked at a store
to stock shelves because he still had to make more money.
(16:33):
You know, imagine you're doing now when one calls all
day like I was telling you about delivering babies given medications,
and then you're in the store stock and shelves. That's insanity.
What kind of to me? That questions? Like me, as
an American? What do I want in this country? Right?
You know what? This is not what I The pandemic
exposed a lot of fault lines in this country, and
(16:56):
one of them was it's not a one service specifically
e m S. Right. We don't talk about the m
S because that's the things you don't want to talk
about life because that acknowledges mortality. Right. We don't go
around the streets walking and talking about our illnesses or
the fact we're gonna die someday. But when we see
the ambulance, we know what they represents, so we don't
(17:16):
acknowledge them, like we acknowledge fire fighters and cops, right,
And cops and fire fighters deserve whatever they get, but
they don't really acknowledge us because to acknowledge us is
to acknowledge your own mortality. The fact that hey, an
ambulance is gonna come to me when I'm sick or injured,
and I don't ever want that, so I'm not gonna
(17:36):
think about that. So when we say we need more
money and benefits, because guess what you're gonna need us.
The second busiest now in one service in the country
is the MS. You're gonna need us. So so I
want people out there who are listening to this is
you know, right, your congressmen, right, your councilman or councilwoman,
(17:57):
and say, hey, listen, what's in AMS situation like in
this city because we have to get them paid. We
have to make sure that when I called that on
one because if we were a healthy society, you wouldn't
think about us until you needed us. Because we don't
have to keep forcing you to remember us right now,
(18:19):
I have to force you to remember us. How are
you self caring? How are you creating the right practice
and infrastructure to continue to to cope, to process and
to get to a stronger place. And then maybe also
you know, well talking a little bit about the inner
strength you're finding, you know, to continue to go on
(18:40):
and the people you're finding. For what is the city
or anyone doing about the type of mental health and
strengthening being done for your colleagues. Those are excellent questions.
I'll start with myself, right, what am I doing the
setting myself? Obviously, I just exposed that I've had suicidal
thoughts to the point where thought I was actually gonna
(19:00):
do it. So I'm not centered. I'm in an extreme.
I've gained a lot of weight. I'm in an extreme.
Begin with that, my physical health and my emotional well
being while talking to today is I'm drained, I'm wiped out,
and all my fellow colleagues are almost in the same
exact boat as me. What does that mean to everybody else? Right?
(19:21):
I have a city that really doesn't support the UMS workers.
What we've done from the union standpoint is we went
and found therapists who work outside of the agency to
provide therapy to care, which we've had numerous members tap into.
I would get calls there in the pandemic from medics
and e M t S. That's say Anthony, I want
to kill myself and I have to sit with that
(19:44):
right after process that and where do I go with that?
And then I say, Anthony, I'm trying to use the
department therapist, which is small and limited and not really
set up for MS and was never set up for
a pandemic. They wouldn't get back to them. So we
went and found therapists. Whether we went and found short
term therapy and then long term therapy. We found agencies
that help them with housing. We found agencies that can
(20:08):
provide money for short term relief because you know, the
wife because it's not working on the husband's not working,
and they rely on two incomes because we don't make
enough money. You know that stress, all those stresses were compounded.
And if you know those are the things we're trying
to do to help ourselves, it helps me helping them
service of others. If I could help some stranger in
(20:29):
the house, I could definitely help the people I sit
next to on an ambulance, and they helped me. If
you want to know what got me through the pandemic
is I would come in and I see these e
m T s and medics that going out on the
road in spite of whatever dangers they face. I mean
they do that every day, but during a pandemic, they
still showed up. I had a call from an e
(20:49):
m T who got sick with the virus, and she
called up to update me at the station, and she says,
the lieutenant they called me, lous Lou, I'm still feeling
I'm so sorry I'm sick. And I said, of course
she's sick. You gotta n you know you got the virus.
You're sick, take care of yourself. She goes, no, I'm
sorry I got sick because I'm not there to help everyone.
(21:11):
And that that really touched me. Man. You know, even
now when I'm talking to I get emotional about it
because here's this e f T who's not making any money,
who is in a city that is kind of leaving
her behind. She's calling me up saying, I'm sorry, I'm
not there for all of you. You know, I was dipping,
(21:32):
and that brings me back up when I hear that.
You know, okay, you know, we at least got each other.
And that's what the MS workers do there in the
paramedics near Tease. You know, we look out for each
other the best we can, and then we look at
for everyone else. Right if we can't look out for
each other and we can't look at for everyone else,
and I would like to see a city in a
(21:54):
country really start to value that. It is priceless in
its essence of life, right, you know, how do you
put a number on it? But I'll tell you what
E M S workers think. We have a number. It's equality.
The numbers equality give us equality, but the other nine
(22:14):
and one services and then everybody gets to do the
work of what we consider priceless. You know, And maybe
you can share how the community can can help. How
can they volunteer, how can they show off for you
anybody listening to this, there's many ways they could help.
Reach out to your local city councils to make sure
that you let them know. E ARMS deserves to be
(22:37):
a vital part of the community because we are community
based medicine and from a local standpoint, we have a
lot of E M t s and medics who really
do struggle because they have to work multiple jobs or
they lost the jobs, are in the pandemic um and
we don't make enough. So we we set up a foundation.
If I may, I can give you the website. Um
(22:58):
it's called the E M S f D n Y
Help Fund. If you went online and googled E M
S F D and Y Help Fund, it will take
you to the website. Anybody who's willing, they can donate
a dollar ten dollars. It goes towards helping the f
D and Y E m S, E M t S
and paramedics. In the greatest times of need. We've been
able to pay people's hospital bills. We've been able to
(23:20):
pay people's back rent. I'm sure there's other communities that
have e MS, communities that have something similar, you know,
and it just what you said, you know, showing up,
showing support when you hear about us in the papers.
You know, we want to just come and do our job.
You know, I've been fighting this fight for so long
in the union and everything else that just I would
(23:42):
just like to come and be a medic. I don't
want to have these fights, you know, like I want.
The biggest issues that we have is, you know, we
want cotton instead of polygestic uniforms. You know, that's the
issues that I want to get to that point someday.
You know, we want ambulances that have you know, uh,
satellite radio with them so we could sit and listen
(24:03):
to you know, those are the stupid things I want
to fight for. I don't want to fight because somebody
can't pay the rent, or that the fact that my
partner greg that passed away from COVID on this job.
His family is only going to get three years pay
and no medical benefits for life. If a firefighter cop
in New York City dies on the job in the
(24:24):
line of duty, their families get pay and benefits for life.
I mean, we're not even equal in death. I keep
replaying the statistics that Anthony shared about the loss of
life he responded to in any given day during the pandemic.
I mean, what was already a rewarding but emotionally taxing
(24:45):
job sounds like it became an emotional minefield. It makes
me think about compassion fatigue or this emotional depletion that
he speaks about, and how we need to listen to
first responders like Anthony when they ask for better mental
health resources. I'm so glad he's in a better place
now with his mental health. And I mean, it really
drives home the importance of taking care of first responders.
(25:06):
Throwing a parade and thinking that that's enough is actually
kind of offensive to the incredible amount of labor these
folks provide for their city. So next week we'll talk
with the grief expert, psychotherapist and the host of the
podcast here after Megan Divine to learn more about the
effect the pandemic has and has had on first responders
(25:29):
like Anthony. Essential Voices with Wilmer val Drama is produced
by me m. R. Raquel, Alison Shano, and Kevin Rotkowski,
with production support from Associate producer Lillian Holman. Executive producers
Wilmer val Drama, Adam Reynolds, Leo Clem and Aaron Hilliard.
This episode was edited by m R. Riquel and Sean
(25:50):
Tracy and features original music by Will Risotti. Special thanks
to Darren Lok and this week's Essential Voice, Anthony ad Mohita.
This is a Clamor and dub Uv Entertainment production in
partnership with I Heart Radio's Michael Dura podcast Network. For
more podcasts from I Heart, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(26:15):
H
Hey, Mr Heym, Welcome back everyone to Essential Voices. This
week's story is very near and dear to my heart
and brings us back to the early days of the pandemic.
It's hard for us to mentally go back there when
we were all so scared and ensured of what was
going on. And I remember checking the numbers frantically to
(00:22):
see how full the hospitals were around me, and of
course I watched as the death toll cryptopping up. I
also had a personal connection with all of this because
my dad got COVID and with his previous health conditions,
we had so many concerns and as a family, you know,
we were worried about what might happen to him. We
(00:43):
were a very lucky family that he made it through
his bout of COVID. But I have expert medical professionals,
so thank for him still being with us today. So
that's why I was incredibly moved and humble by our
Essential Voice Anthony and he's honesty in talking about his
experience with all of this. So kick what we got
(01:05):
on there today Today we're going to hear from Essential
Worker Anthony and Mohea. Anthony's an E M S. First
responder in New York City, and to me, he epitomizes
the heart and soul of first responders, and he paints
a grim picture of the realities that he and his
team were dealing with during the darkest moments of the pandemic.
While hunker down indoors, those fortunate enough not to be
(01:28):
on the front lines heard horror stories from folks like Anthony,
and we were humbled that he shared his story with us.
We owe a lot to first responders like Anthony, and
not only did he share about all the influx of
emergency calls he responded to throughout the pandemic, but also
about the severe toll the pandemic took on e m
S workers and mental health. Anthony is a union leader
and an e m S lieutenant, and so he took
(01:50):
care of his own mental and physical health while also
taking care of his colleagues. Anthony shares this hardest service
that we've seen from all our essential workers on the show,
and he's always thinking about his community and about what
improvements he wants to see in the city's treatment of
fellow e m S workers. And next week we'll have
a roundtable conversation with Grief expert psychotherapists and hosts of
the podcast here after Megan Divine and a note to listeners,
(02:14):
this episode deals with mentions of suicide, so keep that
in mind in deciding where and when to listen. Anthony's
story starts right now. Thank you, Anthony. I'm so happy
to have this conversation with you. Um you're in e
M S right you men telling us a little bit
about what that it means. Yes, it's a noble profession.
(02:34):
E M S stands for Emergency Medical Service, So we're
the ones that operate and staff the ambulance as you
see running by you streets every day. What was your
first day like when you first enter the world. So
my first day in the fire department was the first
day of the streets. I had to go to the academy.
Now I have been in the E M T for
(02:56):
a couple of years before that doing medical transport. But
the first day and no one one was April ten,
two thousand and four, and my first job on the
streets up in Harlem. I got sent to Harlem. When
I came out of the academy was I had a
seven car m V a motor vehicle accident on Lennox
(03:16):
Avenue and one of the cars I flipped over the
media and was laying upside down on the other side,
and I had a baby in a car seat that
was trapped. My first job. So I get running out.
I'm all nervous, you know. I'm like, oh, you know
what's crazy? And there's all these people and we have
all these ambulances and cops and the firefighters are ripping
(03:37):
open the door and I'm inside trying to control bleeding
on people. And we get them all to the hospital.
And I came out of the hospital, Harlem Hospital, and
I was hooked. That adrenaline pump. There's nothing like it.
The magic of this job and the real high when
you go to a call and they're not breathing or
(03:57):
talking and then all of a sudden they get to
the hospital because of your interventions, they're breathing and talking.
That's powerful, man. That's something where you feel the energy
the universe just kind of float. That's kind of what
makes you passionate. Right, It's just the calling. Right, You've
got a phone call from above and tells you this
is your moment to show up. And when you do,
(04:19):
these things slow down, Like, how do you see it,
how do you organize your thoughts in that moment. You
would think that everything would speed up in those moments,
right you get there, somebody's yelling, somebody's doing this, somebody's
having a baby, whatever it is. But really some of
this is training that e M t s and medics
have to learn how to process and then start picking
(04:40):
apart what's important and what's not. And then some of
it is just innatibility, right, because I've worked with people
who don't last on this job. They come on, you know,
after six months they realize it's not for them. They
ain't got it. And the rest of us, while it
does have a psychological impact what we see, just for
your own knowledge, E M S workers have the highest
rates of suicides amongst novel one providers. So it's not
(05:03):
like we see things and then we're able to let
it go. Some of us, it follows us. I myself,
I have had my own suicidal ideations when you get there, though,
even if the outcome is not good, what I feel
is I was blessed for lack of a better world
or fortunate enough to even comfort to living. We're not
(05:24):
always successful. People do die, but everything slows down and
you're able to pick a part in process and do
your job where you're doing it with outside. If you
were looking at me, I'm moving like that. I'm intebating you.
I'm getting you on the e k G. I'm starting
(05:45):
in I V. My partner and I are doing that
in minutes. But for me, it feels like ours. It
feels like ours because I have all the time in
the world because you're just moving. You know, basketball players,
so you gotta move without the ball, right, and that's
what we're doing. Right. If my partner and I we
don't even really speak to each other on the call,
(06:05):
we just know. It's almost it's like, it's just here's
the I V. Here's the medication. What's going on. Okay,
let's get so yeah, and then when it doesn't go well,
because when it goes well, we all get to celebrate. Right,
we won the championship. You weren't asthmatic, you weren't breathing.
You're breathing. We deliver a baby. Here you go, here's
your kid. You know I've delivered sixteen. Not one has
(06:26):
been named Anthony. I'm a little upset. You know, it's
the least you know the nickname something, give me something.
But but when it goes bad, right when somebody dies
because they have a disease we can't fix. But we
didn't get there in time. Well there's injuries or two
too great. We also get to celebrate the life, you know,
(06:47):
we get to sit there with the family and have
a moment of what I call a grief transfer, you know,
because I have to, I have to kind of unload
all that because I failed. Even though there's some extenuation certy,
I still take it as a fairly But I sit
there with family and they look at me and they say,
thank you. Do you know what it's like to have
somebody die? And the family member goes thank you. That
(07:08):
means they saw what my part and I would do it.
They saw all the efforts given, and they're thankful that
somebody else cared about their family as if it was
their own. And that's what it feels like. You know,
things slowed down. You become a part of the family.
The stranger is now my family, and you really feel like,
you know, you're celebrating your life even if even if
(07:30):
that person dies, you're celebrating their life with them. We'll
be right back after this break Welcome back to Essential Voices.
Thank you for sharing that. Anthony, Like, you've got to
think about how well rounded you have to be too.
Answered a call right because it could be anything. And
then all of a sudden you get introduced to a pandemic.
(07:51):
What was that like for you? I think about what
an adventures and rewarding road you've taken, and then you
get introduced to one of the areous times in the
moment of our generation. What was that like? I mean,
what were those conversations? Like? How did it all, you know,
evolve for you? So we knew what pandemic was coming,
we didn't know the extent or how it would hit.
(08:12):
You know, we've been lucky in the past. We've had
some patients. You know, we had the Bowl of Patient,
the first thing Bowl of Patient United States was treated
by the five Department paramedic. We had h one n
one stars, but we didn't get punched in the face.
And then we're hearing this thing and then we start
seeing some patients and we're like, we'll be all right,
We'll be all right. And then around March nineteen March
twentieth last year was like a bomb hit normally e
(08:36):
MS in New York City does four thousand runs a day.
It went to sixty hundred, seven thousand runs a day.
There's only about forty one undred of us, and we
were running all over the city. Will Up until that point,
I always thought, because of the way I was brought up,
because of some of my lifestyle practices and the experience
(08:58):
of this job, that had unlimited supply of empathy. But
the pandemic showed me it was I did not. I
was going to calls that you feel like you can
save them, thirty five year old people who couldn't breathe.
They're talking to you by Tom again to the ambulance.
They went to cardiac arrest. We couldn't get him back.
We saw people die at a crazy clip. In one
(09:22):
sixteen hours shift for me, I had thirteen cardiac arrest,
thirteen people that we couldn't get back. It wasn't just me,
the medics and E. M. T. S. I was never
more proud of them, but I was also scared for
them because they saw so much death, so much suffering.
And then what really brought it home was we started
(09:44):
to get sick. At one time, the workforce was outsick.
So he took a workforce at four thousand. He made
it three thousand. I didn't get sick. I watched a
lot of people get sick around me. To this day,
I've had ten medics and the mt s passed away
from COVID. I've also had four of them commit suicide.
(10:05):
And I still have a whole slew of others that
still have not been back to work because of COVID,
because of COVID longhaulers or other medical issues that arose
from it. How it affected me because I'm the vice
president of my union, so a lot of people were
calling me. You know, I'm fighting with management to get
his more supplies, and people are really kind of confiding
(10:27):
in me. And I started the struggle with my own things,
and you know, I felt suicidal myself earlier this year
is when it all hit me, and I really felt
like I was bottoming out. Thankfully, I have friends and
and and other resources I could tap into. But there
was a moment when I had no hope. In February,
I was like, that's it. I'm done. And I had
(10:50):
started to go through the machinations of killing myself, you know,
which has always been the scary part. You know, you
read about that that I've had patients like that where
they can and see the angles anymore, and so they
start to do the planning. As long as you could
see the angles, you can see the hope, you see
a light around the corner. But then then no, I
(11:12):
really felt that for the first time in my life.
So the process all of this while this is happening,
and then you're seeing what the government's doing, which is nothing.
You're seeing supplies run out, You're seeing people get into
fights because they don't want to wear a mask. I
was kind of hoping this was a moment that you know,
we would look at each other as Americans and be like, yeah,
(11:32):
we're in this together. I mean, you were here, you
saw what happened. There was and there were wonderful people
during it. The actor Jeffrey Wright hooked up with us.
He fed us every day, which was big. We had
people come into the station and saying, hey, you know,
we just want to check on you. That was nice.
We saw a lot of individual moments of beauty, but
(11:54):
I never saw e m s handled that. You know,
in the past, we maybe get one day sanity the
hurricane or at nine eleven event, you know, you get
the surge and then it dies. This went on for weeks.
Did you feel like the infrastructure in New York was
supporting you, guys? Say in day out, you know, it
(12:15):
seems like, you know, you guys were taking on a lot.
New York City individuals and communities were really there for us,
the City of New York itself as far as management, No,
they were. The fire department has been mismanaged for years.
The short staffing we've been warning them about because e M.
(12:35):
S workers when not when one workers right when you
call now on one do you have cops, firefighters, c ms.
But for some reason E M. S workers, they want
to pay thirty five thousand dollars less. They won't give
him the same pay and benefits. So right now, at
the height of the pandemic of my workforce had less
than five years experience. That's not how you run a
(12:55):
nine one agency. And then about two and a half
weeks into the height of the pandemic, we're being told
of running out of the end ninety five mask. We're
starting to use gowns that are made of plastic, like
you know, the school lunch ladies used to have. We're
starting to get the threat of We're not gonna be
able to respond to calls because I can't help you
if I'm sacrificing my own health right and the mayor,
(13:18):
you know, the mayor of New York City let us down.
I think he still continues to let us down. He
came out with statements EMS work is different. When he
was asked, should we take care of the EMS workers? Oh,
we'll get to it. He wants to have a parade
for us now essential workers, and that rings hollow. You know,
it's like let the meat cake. You know, we'll be
(13:40):
right back after this break, welcome back to Essential voices.
It makes me really sad, man, It makes me. It
makes me feel really really sad to know that on
a local level, on a neighborhood level, I was sat
in a community level. We have to come up with
our own solutions. Um, when we show up in elect leadership.
(14:03):
That's it's meant to understand what it's like to be
you and your neighborhood. You know, do you mind sharing
a little bit more about your work with the union
and what steps are you guys taking and you know
what where you guys are in this conversation. So yeah,
I'm the vice president of the f t n Y
E M S Officers Union. That's the lieutenants and captains
(14:25):
were all paramedics and UH. For years, we've been trying
to fight for e MS, what we call E M
S parody with the other nine one one agencies, police
and fire. And right now as I'm talking to you,
I'm taking a break, but we're negotiations with the city
and they're fighting us for everything. I think we're gonna
get a contract. It's gonna be a nice raise, but
(14:45):
a lot of it is funded through givebacks that we're doing.
But you know, we supported a mayor who I think
is gonna win, who promised us parody. You know what
I said to him on the campaign trail was e
MS has been wandering the desert for forty years. Bring
us home. So from a union perspective, what I want
to do is because I know how hard we work
(15:08):
and how essential we are, I want to make sure
that E M S workers only have to work one job.
Right now, I work with E M t s and
medics who work three jobs. I work three jobs. You
shouldn't as a paramedic in this city, in the busiest
E M S service in the world. You should not
have to work three jobs. When I have to work
(15:29):
three jobs. You know who loses out you, you're the citizen.
I'm not focused on this job like I should be.
I'm not available for this job like I should be.
I'm not happy at home because I don't get to
see you know, I'm not married, but you know I
won't get to see my wife and kids. I'm not
happy because I can't go out. I'm constantly working. If
(15:50):
people really want to get involved, so that union leaders
can really give the public what they deserve as a dedicated,
paid em mess workforce. This should not be a volunteered thing.
God blessed the people that volunteered to do this. But
you should not have to wake up somebody at three
in the morning from their bed to come in and
(16:10):
help you because you have a heart attack. You know.
It should be a national service like in other countries.
We should be paid accordingly so that we can live
in the cities we work with. I worked with guys
who drive uber during the pandemic. I had an e
M T at my station that would finish working crazy
hours and then he went and worked at a store
to stock shelves because he still had to make more money.
(16:33):
You know, imagine you're doing now when one calls all
day like I was telling you about delivering babies given medications,
and then you're in the store stock and shelves. That's insanity.
What kind of to me? That questions? Like me, as
an American? What do I want in this country? Right?
You know what? This is not what I The pandemic
exposed a lot of fault lines in this country, and
(16:56):
one of them was it's not a one service specifically
e m S. Right. We don't talk about the m
S because that's the things you don't want to talk
about life because that acknowledges mortality. Right. We don't go
around the streets walking and talking about our illnesses or
the fact we're gonna die someday. But when we see
the ambulance, we know what they represents, so we don't
(17:16):
acknowledge them, like we acknowledge fire fighters and cops, right,
And cops and fire fighters deserve whatever they get, but
they don't really acknowledge us because to acknowledge us is
to acknowledge your own mortality. The fact that hey, an
ambulance is gonna come to me when I'm sick or injured,
and I don't ever want that, so I'm not gonna
(17:36):
think about that. So when we say we need more
money and benefits, because guess what you're gonna need us.
The second busiest now in one service in the country
is the MS. You're gonna need us. So so I
want people out there who are listening to this is
you know, right, your congressmen, right, your councilman or councilwoman,
(17:57):
and say, hey, listen, what's in AMS situation like in
this city because we have to get them paid. We
have to make sure that when I called that on
one because if we were a healthy society, you wouldn't
think about us until you needed us. Because we don't
have to keep forcing you to remember us right now,
(18:19):
I have to force you to remember us. How are
you self caring? How are you creating the right practice
and infrastructure to continue to to cope, to process and
to get to a stronger place. And then maybe also
you know, well talking a little bit about the inner
strength you're finding, you know, to continue to go on
(18:40):
and the people you're finding. For what is the city
or anyone doing about the type of mental health and
strengthening being done for your colleagues. Those are excellent questions.
I'll start with myself, right, what am I doing the
setting myself? Obviously, I just exposed that I've had suicidal
thoughts to the point where thought I was actually gonna
(19:00):
do it. So I'm not centered. I'm in an extreme.
I've gained a lot of weight. I'm in an extreme.
Begin with that, my physical health and my emotional well
being while talking to today is I'm drained, I'm wiped out,
and all my fellow colleagues are almost in the same
exact boat as me. What does that mean to everybody else? Right?
(19:21):
I have a city that really doesn't support the UMS workers.
What we've done from the union standpoint is we went
and found therapists who work outside of the agency to
provide therapy to care, which we've had numerous members tap into.
I would get calls there in the pandemic from medics
and e M t S. That's say Anthony, I want
to kill myself and I have to sit with that
(19:44):
right after process that and where do I go with that?
And then I say, Anthony, I'm trying to use the
department therapist, which is small and limited and not really
set up for MS and was never set up for
a pandemic. They wouldn't get back to them. So we
went and found therapists. Whether we went and found short
term therapy and then long term therapy. We found agencies
that help them with housing. We found agencies that can
(20:08):
provide money for short term relief because you know, the
wife because it's not working on the husband's not working,
and they rely on two incomes because we don't make
enough money. You know that stress, all those stresses were compounded.
And if you know those are the things we're trying
to do to help ourselves, it helps me helping them
service of others. If I could help some stranger in
(20:29):
the house, I could definitely help the people I sit
next to on an ambulance, and they helped me. If
you want to know what got me through the pandemic
is I would come in and I see these e
m T s and medics that going out on the
road in spite of whatever dangers they face. I mean
they do that every day, but during a pandemic, they
still showed up. I had a call from an e
(20:49):
m T who got sick with the virus, and she
called up to update me at the station, and she says,
the lieutenant they called me, lous Lou, I'm still feeling
I'm so sorry I'm sick. And I said, of course
she's sick. You gotta n you know you got the virus.
You're sick, take care of yourself. She goes, no, I'm
sorry I got sick because I'm not there to help everyone.
(21:11):
And that that really touched me. Man. You know, even
now when I'm talking to I get emotional about it
because here's this e f T who's not making any money,
who is in a city that is kind of leaving
her behind. She's calling me up saying, I'm sorry, I'm
not there for all of you. You know, I was dipping,
(21:32):
and that brings me back up when I hear that.
You know, okay, you know, we at least got each other.
And that's what the MS workers do there in the
paramedics near Tease. You know, we look out for each
other the best we can, and then we look at
for everyone else. Right if we can't look out for
each other and we can't look at for everyone else,
and I would like to see a city in a
(21:54):
country really start to value that. It is priceless in
its essence of life, right, you know, how do you
put a number on it? But I'll tell you what
E M S workers think. We have a number. It's equality.
The numbers equality give us equality, but the other nine
(22:14):
and one services and then everybody gets to do the
work of what we consider priceless. You know, And maybe
you can share how the community can can help. How
can they volunteer, how can they show off for you
anybody listening to this, there's many ways they could help.
Reach out to your local city councils to make sure
that you let them know. E ARMS deserves to be
(22:37):
a vital part of the community because we are community
based medicine and from a local standpoint, we have a
lot of E M t s and medics who really
do struggle because they have to work multiple jobs or
they lost the jobs, are in the pandemic um and
we don't make enough. So we we set up a foundation.
If I may, I can give you the website. Um
(22:58):
it's called the E M S f D n Y
Help Fund. If you went online and googled E M
S F D and Y Help Fund, it will take
you to the website. Anybody who's willing, they can donate
a dollar ten dollars. It goes towards helping the f
D and Y E m S, E M t S
and paramedics. In the greatest times of need. We've been
able to pay people's hospital bills. We've been able to
(23:20):
pay people's back rent. I'm sure there's other communities that
have e MS, communities that have something similar, you know,
and it just what you said, you know, showing up,
showing support when you hear about us in the papers.
You know, we want to just come and do our job.
You know, I've been fighting this fight for so long
in the union and everything else that just I would
(23:42):
just like to come and be a medic. I don't
want to have these fights, you know, like I want.
The biggest issues that we have is, you know, we
want cotton instead of polygestic uniforms. You know, that's the
issues that I want to get to that point someday.
You know, we want ambulances that have you know, uh,
satellite radio with them so we could sit and listen
(24:03):
to you know, those are the stupid things I want
to fight for. I don't want to fight because somebody
can't pay the rent, or that the fact that my
partner greg that passed away from COVID on this job.
His family is only going to get three years pay
and no medical benefits for life. If a firefighter cop
in New York City dies on the job in the
(24:24):
line of duty, their families get pay and benefits for life.
I mean, we're not even equal in death. I keep
replaying the statistics that Anthony shared about the loss of
life he responded to in any given day during the pandemic.
I mean, what was already a rewarding but emotionally taxing
(24:45):
job sounds like it became an emotional minefield. It makes
me think about compassion fatigue or this emotional depletion that
he speaks about, and how we need to listen to
first responders like Anthony when they ask for better mental
health resources. I'm so glad he's in a better place
now with his mental health. And I mean, it really
drives home the importance of taking care of first responders.
(25:06):
Throwing a parade and thinking that that's enough is actually
kind of offensive to the incredible amount of labor these
folks provide for their city. So next week we'll talk
with the grief expert, psychotherapist and the host of the
podcast here after Megan Divine to learn more about the
effect the pandemic has and has had on first responders
(25:29):
like Anthony. Essential Voices with Wilmer val Drama is produced
by me m. R. Raquel, Alison Shano, and Kevin Rotkowski,
with production support from Associate producer Lillian Holman. Executive producers
Wilmer val Drama, Adam Reynolds, Leo Clem and Aaron Hilliard.
This episode was edited by m R. Riquel and Sean
(25:50):
Tracy and features original music by Will Risotti. Special thanks
to Darren Lok and this week's Essential Voice, Anthony ad Mohita.
This is a Clamor and dub Uv Entertainment production in
partnership with I Heart Radio's Michael Dura podcast Network. For
more podcasts from I Heart, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(26:15):
H
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