November 1, 2025 • 50 mins
Episode 308:What happens when a paramedic turns years of street-medicine notes into reflections on humor, heartbreak, and humanity? Her book: "A Real Emergency: Stories from the Ambulance" is a must-read as Joanna’s writing doesn’t just capture what we do as medics, it captures who we are: compassionate, flawed, and human. In this episode, Joanna reflects on her path from feeling adrift in Oakland to finding purpose as a paramedic serving the communities of Reno, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco. Her insights shine a light on the humor, heartbreak, and compassion that define the world of EMS.
https://www.spreaker.com/episode/joanna-sokol-notes-from-the-streets--68380096
Medic2Medic is back, bringing authentic voices, untold stories, and the human side of Emergency Medical Services and beyond.
https://www.spreaker.com/episode/joanna-sokol-notes-from-the-streets--68380096
Medic2Medic is back, bringing authentic voices, untold stories, and the human side of Emergency Medical Services and beyond.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Medica.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
Medica is probably sponsored by Magical Destinations by Steve, where
your next vacation is not just a trip, it is
a story waiting to be told, whether it's Disney, a cruise,
or a dream getaway across the globe. Let Magical Destinations
by Steve turn your travel jeams into lasting memories. You
can reach out to Magical Destinations by Steve at s
Cohen at created Travel Collection dot com. Now let's get
(00:23):
started and Welcome to Medic the Medic podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Co mid gating.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Attention.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
All listeners on this frequency stand by for.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
An important announcement.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Welcome to Medic to Medic podcast, the weekly podcast for
EMS providers, EMS leaders, EMS, medical directors and others involved
in or those who have an interest in emergency medical services.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Ladies and gentlemen, here's your host, Steve.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Cohen, coming from the Fern Down Medical Medic Podcast Studios.
It's another fine podcast of medic Do Medic Hi, I'm
your host, Steve Cohen. You can reach me at Medical
Medic Podcasts at gmail dot com. You can download this
podcast as well as others at Apple Podcasts, Podbeans, Spotify,
(01:19):
Speaker dot com. And I am so happy to be back.
As you know, Medical Medic Podcasts is a place where
we share the stories of ems, the professionals, the stories,
the triumphs, the heartache, and everything in between. I'm so
happy to welcome my guest today who has written one
(01:40):
of the most honest and haunting portraits of our EMS world.
For fifteen years, Joanna Soko lived in the life of
a street medic, documenting her experiences and notebooks on scraps
of paper, even the backs of gloves. Those reflections became
the foundation of her new book, Our Real Emergency Stories
from the Ambulance. Welcome to Medical Medic Podcast.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Thank you so much, happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, you're writing just doesn't capture what we do as
medics and EMTs. It captures who we are. It's compassion,
there's some flaws, and also the human touch. I really
do appreciate that honest, opinion and honest writing that you
have put into your book.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
So again, welcome. I always like to start out with
tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 5 (02:24):
Yeah, like you said, I'm a street medic. I know
a lot of the guests you've had on the show
have really long and impressive EMS pedigrees, and I don't
have that. I have not been a chief. I have
not been a CEO of anything.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
I worked for. I got my EMT pretty young.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
Early twenties, like a lot of us, and I spent
four or five years doing sort of a smattering of
part time EMT jobs.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
I was a wilderness responder, as a ski patroller, I
did special.
Speaker 5 (02:57):
Events, so a lot of the kind of classic I
did a little bit if T, and then once I
met to medic school, I spent about ten years in
the nine on one system. I was a paramedic on
the ambulance in three different counties, Santa Cruz, California, Reno, Nevada,
and then spent the bulk of my career and the
EMS division of the SFFD in San Francisco with the
(03:19):
San Francisco Fire Department, did a little bit of community
medicine at the end, and the book was kind of
in my back pocket. I think, like most EMTs and medics,
we all collect stories, whether we want to or not.
You know, we're just out there seeing these really intense
parts of life and death. And I was always a
journaler and a note taker. It's just like what I
did with my brain at the end, of the day,
(03:39):
the way that I would sort out all the information
as I would take notes, and so the last year
or two I got the opportunity to put them together
into an essay collection and it was a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
But yeah, I've really just.
Speaker 5 (03:53):
Been an EMT in a street medic for about fifteen years.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
That's pretty much my whole pedigree, my whole career.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
There's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
But I really want to go back to I guess
the beginning and what was your calling. I know that
in your book you describe yourself as an adverse black
sheep and a family of academics. I guess it's a
fascinating backdrop to how you eventually found you're calling an EMS.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
So tell us a little bit about that. Thank you.
Speaker 5 (04:23):
Yeah, I have to say, since you asked about it.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
My mom was really annoyed with me that I called
her an academic. She got really offended by that, and
I was like, father, what to say? You taught at
UCU Berkeley for like ten years. What do you want
me to put And.
Speaker 5 (04:38):
She was like, I'm fine because my mom was actually
a field journalist for most of her career.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
She was like, I had a job, I was out
in the field. I was working.
Speaker 5 (04:45):
I wasn't sitting in some dusty office. And then my
dad too had a super impressive career, and I always really.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Liked science and medicine.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
I figured I would go off to college and go
into science and medicine and either do research or maybe
medical school. And I found when I got to college.
I went to a really competitive biology program that was
pretty well known at UBC University, British Columbia, and I
found that I got there.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
I really liked the science.
Speaker 5 (05:16):
I loved the information that I was learning, but I
could not sit still in a classroom for like ten
hours a day and study, which I think I teach
EMTs and medics now for a living at a community college.
That's kind of how I make my live in these days.
And I think that's really common, you know, Whenever I
tell the kids that in the classroom, Ember and starts laughing,
because I think that's how many many EMTs and medics
(05:37):
get into this job. We like science, we like medicine,
we like helping people, and we are extremely bad at
sitting still. So I was in college trying to get
this biology degree, and I was staring out the window
at the mountains and the snow, and I wanted to
go snowboarding. I wanted to go to concerts. I wanted
to go out into the world and see what there
was to see. And I had a really hard time
(05:58):
just sitting in the library watching the world go buy
out the window, and so I ended.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Up dropping out of school. I went back, I dropped
out again, and eventually I took an EMT class.
Speaker 5 (06:09):
And I would say the second day of my EMT class,
I was like, Oh, this is what i'mou do for
a living, this is who I am.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
I didn't have any.
Speaker 5 (06:19):
Paramedics or firefighters or nurses at all in my family history.
Like I said, my dad was in law, my mom's
a journalist. You know, it wasn't something that I was
familiar with. But I love adrenaline, I love science. I
love helping people. And when I saw the way that
EMT class worked, it was so immediate, you.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Know, it was so visceral.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
It wasn't We're going to sit here and memorize these
like hormone cascades for a month.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
And a half.
Speaker 5 (06:43):
It was here's how to stop bleeding, here's how to
start a heart again. You know, you're going to go
out into the street on your hands and knees literally
sometimes and you're gonna use your body to help people
in real time. And I just thought that was the
coolest thing I'd ever heard. And I was like, oh, yeah,
we're doing this, and I pretty much never looked back.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Well, let me just share a quick antidote because I
kind of followed the.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Same path where my dad.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
My dad was a pharmacist, my mom was a school teacher.
My brother was a star athlete and also very smart.
He was did very well in his SATs and had
all kinds of scholarships and all that. And me, I
was struggling through school as it was in high school,
and I didn't know what I was going to do,
(07:32):
but I did go to I started my freshman year
at Duquanne University in Pittsburgh. At the end of that
freshman year, my QPA was one point eight. Yeah, there
you go, right, I dropped up. I dropped out.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
I actually also had a high achieving older brother.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
But so, I mean, so we had that path, So
I keep going. I my dad had a heart attack.
My dad's technician and orderly and stepped out unit because
back then you stayed in the hospital for six or
seven days when you had a heart attack. Ed Ed
Brinkley was his name, and Ed was an EMT and
(08:10):
a suburb outside of Pittsburgh, and they started talking. My
dad always very friendly and talk to people, and my
dad heard Dad. I said, you know, my son likes
to show emergency. Is that something that you maybe could
talk him about? One thing that I to another end.
I started my career as a volunteer with no certification. Okay,
I had six months before I went to EMT school.
(08:30):
But long story short, I've been doing this for forty
three years, and because of my dad's heart attack and
Ed Brinkley, I've been in this business. People say EMS
is not a career. It's been a great career for me.
I have nothing but good things to say about emergency
medical services and it's been great for me. I dropped
out of school.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
I did.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
My parents let me drop out, but I promising might
get a degree, which I did eventually after fourteen years
and two kids.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
So I did.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
I did get a degree, and I'm happy about that
because I did. It open up a bunch of doors
for me. I'm a firm believer in education. But okay,
that's enough about me. And I don't like talking about
me on the podcast, Like no, I love that.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
I love hearing it. I one of the things they
did for my book was interviewed a bunch of other
e mts and medics. I really like having not.
Speaker 5 (09:13):
Just my own voice, but hearing how other people got
into this and how other people did it. And I
feel like there's two really common paths to EMS. One
is the folks who basically grow up, they're born into it,
you know, they have they have parents or uncles or
aunts who are nurses and firefighters and cops, and they're like,
I'm gonna I'm gonna do this for a living, and
me a firefighter.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
That's who I am. That's what I'm gonna do. And
they get in really young.
Speaker 5 (09:35):
And then I feel like a lot of other folks
that I've talked to just kind of fall into it.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
They try to do other things for a living.
Speaker 5 (09:42):
It doesn't really work, they don't they don't feel right
about it, and then they get into EMS and they're like, oh, yeah,
this is a job. You know.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
I've met a lot of a.
Speaker 5 (09:51):
Lot of folks like that who sort of tried to
take a more traditional path and couldn't hang because you know,
we have the attention span of four year old puppies.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Yes, I understand, and that's why when you were telling
your story at the beginning, it's why I was smiling
because our pastors are parallel. I know, people can't see
me smiling and didn't see you telling the story because
as I promised that, we were both smiling.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
So it was really good.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
You've worked in some really unique places Reno with the
casinos as well, and of course you spent the walk
of your time in San Francisco. It's a wide range
of different areas. Why don't you talk about that experience.
Let's start with Reno. How'd you get to Reno and
what was it like?
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah, i'd love to I actually grew up in Oakland.
Speaker 5 (10:39):
Yeah, and then I've been in Santa Cruz for a
long time now, but I did, which is relevant to
Reno because I was such a city kid.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
I grew up in.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
Oakland, the Bay Area, late nineties, early two thousands. It
was just like it was a really fun place.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
It was kind of rough, very vibrant, and I went to.
Speaker 5 (10:55):
Reno because I got my medic shirt at a time.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
And it was really hard to get a job. It was.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
It was very competitive and you had to go get experience,
especially in the Bay Area in California, it was it
was competitive, and so.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I basically just kept asking.
Speaker 5 (11:12):
Friends from farther and farther away, you know, do you
know anywhere that's hiring?
Speaker 3 (11:15):
Where do I go? What do I do?
Speaker 5 (11:16):
And I ended up finding an agency that was hiring
in Reno, Nevada. It was Remza in Reno, and I
went out there pretty blind.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
I really had no idea what I was in for.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
I had done my schooling and internship in Santa Cruz,
and I'd worked a bunch of part time jobs, and
I got out there and Reno is amazing. I fell
in love. I love that town. I still go out
there probably once a month, whenever I can handle the drive.
It's a huge catchment zone. So we had the city
(11:48):
of Reno and Sparks, and then all of Washoe County,
which actually goes all the way up to the Oregon
border and almost all the way down to Carson and
then out to the California border.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
So you had it.
Speaker 5 (12:01):
Was an incredibly exhausting, challenging, fun place to work as
a new medic You had all the problems of a
major city. Like you mentioned, the casinos are there. It's
a big, rowdy it's kind of a smaller, almost more
deserty version of Vegas. You know, people come out there
on purpose to make bad decisions, and so the casinos
(12:26):
get really really rowdy. People go up there, they don't
realize they're at high altitude, they don't bring their medications.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
They party real hard.
Speaker 5 (12:34):
And then you also had a ton of trailer parks.
You had a ton of kind of suburban area out
in the Reno.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
And Washo, and then it actually got really rural.
Speaker 5 (12:42):
I got a little taste of rural ms, which is
a really different flavor and it's really fun. We went
about two three hours out into the desert and there
was some reservation land, there.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Was some small towns. There was these like.
Speaker 5 (12:56):
Empty desert ranches where you're going out there dual response
with a helicopter and you're talking to the helicopter on
the repeater with each other to try to figure out
the mile marker, to get the right dirt road, to
go up the right desert canyon ridge, to find some
ranch where you go in and there's a bunch of
signs that are like no trespassers, no visitors, we don't
call nine one one, you know, And then you get
(13:18):
out there and someone's sick or someone's having something going wrong.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
So it was very busy. Like I learned later that
pretty much every system I've ever worked in is understaffed,
but so that wasn't unique. But it was pretty.
Speaker 5 (13:30):
Understaffed when I was there, and you just got a
ton of experience in the first two years I was
a medic.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
I ran a lot of calls, I saw a lot
of stuff. It was really fun. I love the people
that I worked with out there.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
I want to get back to San Francisco a little bit.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
But I, like you said, you grew up in Oakland
and you got your EMT and going to be a
medic school, went off to Reno as well, and those
experiences they're so different.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
How did you shape you as a paramedic.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
I mean, that's a great question. They were really different.
Speaker 5 (14:04):
And I came to San Francisco last, right, And San
Francisco's a.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Really unique system. I think, like a lot of big.
Speaker 5 (14:12):
City systems, it's got a lot of the same problems
that a lot of big city systems do we've got.
Really SF is a really famous city and it's a
really populated city, but it's also a very small city.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
It's actually only seven by seven square miles.
Speaker 5 (14:27):
It's like a tiny little peninsula, and so you're twenty
minutes from everything.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
All our hospitals are really close together.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
You've got twelve hospitals in basically a twenty thirty minute
like area that you can drive around, and so all
your transport times are really fast. There's a ton of staff,
there's a bunch of medics, it's mostly als. Our protocols
are pretty narrow because there's always somebody with more experience
than you. There's always a supervisor on their way, there's
(14:55):
always like another engine medic, there's always something to bounced
something off of, and you're always, you know, ten fifteen
minutes from the hospital. And so having my first experience
be out in Reno, which was almost the opposite from that.
You're running calls in Reno sometimes where you're two hours
from a hospital with like a volunteer crew who maybe
has a decade old first responder license but doesn't even
(15:16):
have their empt and you're the only medic on scene.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
So it taught me learning how.
Speaker 5 (15:21):
To become a medic in Reno taught me a lot.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Of self reliance.
Speaker 5 (15:24):
And it's not that medics in San Francisco don't have that,
but I did notice sometimes when I got to the city,
there were things that I trusted myself to do. There
were things that they had already had that sense of
independence and trust, where it was like, and we'll figure
it out, like we can make this work, you know.
And I think Reno really taught me to be adaptable
and to be self reliant because you just had We
(15:45):
had a lot of really crazy calls out there. You know,
you're going from somebody in a casino hotel who took
way too much of whatever, and they're super super altered
and agitated. They're fighting like six cops. There's broken bottles everywhere.
So you're working that call, and then the next call,
you're you know, an hour and a half out into
the desert with somebody who seems like they're having a
(16:06):
cardiac event.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
But it's snowing, so.
Speaker 5 (16:08):
You can't get the helicopter to fly, so you've got
to figure out what to do with them. And so
we just saw a lot. I think it was a
really great training ground and when I came to San Francisco,
I had a really great basis of that independence and
that self reliance that I think some of the medics
that grow up in more crowded places don't always necessarily
it takes them longer to get there.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Just get off the subject for a second.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Why I'm looking looking behind me is that you say
you have a stubborn dog. Well, my executive producer here
is Bailey Bell. She's a four year old golden and
every time she hears your voice, her tail is just
wagged and I'm like, yeah, she's coming over a little bit.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
But yeah, she was.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
I was.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
I'm hearing this cat cat tap.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
I'm going I'm starting to mean to interrupt the podcast,
but at all producer of the executive producer, to make
sure I'm doing everything right as well. All right, Well,
I appreciate that description and how you know, kind of
shaped your role and how you became so confident. But
one thing that really struck me in your book is
(17:17):
your honesty about the abusive love affair that you had
with the job. You call ems addictive, and see if
I'm accurate on this. You said abusive love affair you
had with the job you called ems both addictive and damaging,
you know, and I think a lot of us in
the field kind of understand that.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
What the tension and instantly.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
The gratification and disappointment comes with it. What really made
you finally decide to write the book? I know there's
multiple questions in.
Speaker 5 (17:49):
There, but yeah, absolutely, no, I do think the job
is addictive and damaging. I think a lot of us
can probably relate to that. And one of the themes
of the book is how fun and rewarding and beautiful
it is, and also how it destroys your body.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
And mind over time.
Speaker 5 (18:07):
But in terms of what made me write the book,
a friend of mine told me once, they say, you
write your first book when you can't not anymore, when
you just like can't hold it in anymore. And so
what happened with me is I'd been carrying around stories
(18:29):
for years and years, and I was taking notes. The
stack of notebooks was getting taller, the stories were getting heavier.
It started to feel like it was physically heavy to
carry around all these stories inside my head and inside
my dot and I just wanted them out of me.
In some ways, I think in a lot of ways,
writing a book is.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
A really selfish process. There's a lot of ego, you know,
you just have all this stuff inside of you that
you want to put out into the world.
Speaker 5 (18:56):
And I had been taking notes, and I'd also been
reading and doing a lot of research. I learned a
lot about other EMS systems, about back in the horse
and buggy days, you know, before we had motors. I
find something really romantic about horse drawn ambulances.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
I loved learning about those.
Speaker 5 (19:14):
I learned about the early cholera days, when we first
started putting together our new ambulance systems and response to
colera epidemics in New York. I learned about the Freedom
House Project, and you know, Kevin Hazard's books incredible, and
so I was just kind of carrying around this heavier
and heavier pile, and there was something that I really
wanted to say about EMS. I just I think it's
(19:38):
such an incredible career, and I think a lot of
the depictions there's there's been some really cool memoirs written
about EMS, but I think most of the depictions we
see of it in the media are total nonsense. And
we all know that I keep having these conversations over
and over again with my coworkers. You know, we're standing
line at the hospital or whatever, and we're just like, man,
(19:59):
if you pople knew what this job really was, you know,
nobody knows what this actually is.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
And so I finally got to a point where I
was like, well, what if we tell them? I want to.
Speaker 5 (20:08):
And the big reason I wrote the book was just
that I got lucky one of my very very best
friends who I've known since we were eighteen years old,
our whole lives.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
We kind of grew up.
Speaker 5 (20:19):
I went into ems and paramedicine and she went into
writing and editing and publishing for a living, and that
was just the job that she went into. And we
were really close and we would talk about life and work.
We talked on the phone all the time, and she
would say, you should really write a book about this stuff.
You should write about this stuff. We should write essays.
We wrote a couple essays together and they were really
fun and they did pretty well.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
And then eventually she got in a position.
Speaker 5 (20:42):
Where she was working for Penguin Random House, for a
publishing company, and part of her job involved finding new
writers and new voices and new books.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
And so yeah, so it was tall.
Speaker 5 (20:52):
People ask how I got a book deal, and it
was just dumb luck. Like that's how it's because I
happened to make friends with Hailey Cullingham in first year
of You because she was the only other girl awake
in my dorm room at three in the morning that
wanted to hang.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Out with me.
Speaker 5 (21:06):
But she was standing outside and I struck up a
conversation and we were best friends ever since. And so
when she was working for Penguin and we we had
this idea. By then, I had a stack of notebooks
and journals that was, you know, three feet high, and
all these stories I've been gathering in interviews and research,
and we pitched.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
The book together. We wrote a proposal together, and.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
We pitched it to her bosses, and you know, they
bought it, and so we got to do this project together.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
That was really fun.
Speaker 5 (21:35):
And when I wrote the book, I kind of had
two parallel lines of thought.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
One of them was, you know, maybe I'll.
Speaker 5 (21:43):
Write this book about ems and how beautiful and how
screwed up.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
This job is, and we'll get a little bit of
recognition for what we.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
Do, and people will see how hard this job is
and put a little bit more value in ems and
we'll fix everything and change the world. But that was
always just kind of a ridiculous pipe dream. And the
other line I thought the bigger thing was just I
really want to work on this project with my best
friend for fun, and maybe some people will read it
and they'll think it's cool, and.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Maybe no one will read it.
Speaker 5 (22:11):
But either way, I'll be able to take these stories
that I've been gathering for my whole career and we'll
be able to put him together into a cool shape
and see if we can make something cool out of them.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Absolutely great that Haley was your best friend and she
really helped you along this way. Were there any other
ms or authors as you talked about. You mentioned Kevin.
Kevin's been on my podcast twice now, when you first
book came out, and then when he wrote about Freedom
House and John Moon. John Moon and I worked together.
John and Moon was one of my cheeks.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
You mentioned Pittsburgh.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yeah, And the thing about it is I did not
appreciate when I was working for the city of Pittsburgh,
cause I worked with a handful of Freedom House paramedics
and I just did not appreciate it as I do today.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
I've had a few of them on in the past
as well.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
But yeah, Freedom House is just because the Freedom House
doesn't start, I never get into the city of Pittsburgh,
and so it means a lot to me. Plus I
was stationed in the Hill District where Freedom House was. Wow,
so there's that connection. And I worked Medic five, which
was in the Hill district and still in the Hill District,
and so it was just a lot of that. And
(23:22):
did you talk to any authors before you start to
write this or get some ideas? Did you talk to
Kevin or did you talk to anybody?
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Kevin and I have emailed, we still haven't actually met.
I would love to someday.
Speaker 5 (23:33):
I basically wrote him like some fan mail and I
when I first had my manuscript, one of the things
you do when you first get done with the book
is you try to sell it. You try to send
copies to other writers who are more famous than you
so that they'll write.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
You blurbs, write the little quotes on the front of
the book that are like this book was good. I'm
famous from Kevin Hazard, you know. So I wrote him a.
Speaker 5 (23:54):
Letter that was basically half fan mail and half.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Like I did a thing. Will you read my thing
maybe and say that it's good. And he was.
Speaker 5 (24:02):
Incredibly nice and super gracious. He wrote me back, he
said really nice things about the.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Book, and so we've emailed a little bit.
Speaker 5 (24:07):
I'd love to meet him someday, and so, yeah, his
book was a big influence. I am kind of I
can be a little bit introverted.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
I did a lot of reading.
Speaker 5 (24:18):
I read a ton of books when I was getting
ready for mine, and most of the people that I
talked to were just other EMS professionals, and so I
reached out to folks that I knew, folks that I'd
work with. One of the really big influences on the
book was there's a guy in the book featured pretty
(24:38):
heavily named dan Quino, and he is not nationally famous,
but in Santa Cruz he's an absolute legend.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
And one thing I think is really cool about.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
EMS is every EMS system has this guy or a
guy like this, somebody who's been in the system for
forty years.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
He knows everybody who's been working their butt off the
whole time.
Speaker 5 (24:58):
We have them.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
In San Francisco, you got I'm.
Speaker 5 (25:00):
In Reno, and in Santa Cruz it's dan Quino he's
been working there for thirty forty years. He's an amazing guy.
He's an incredible medic. Everybody kind of knows him. He
was actually there when they were first building AMR. I
didn't realize this until I was interviewing him, but the
guy who first put together AMR was actually working in
(25:21):
Santa Cruz at the time, and he was gathering up
a couple of little companies from the Santa Cruz, Sanatra area,
and so that was really cool.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
And so I knew Quino briefly from.
Speaker 5 (25:33):
My time working for him as a medic, and I
was a brand new medic.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
I think I pissed him off a couple times.
Speaker 5 (25:38):
He was sort of the gruff supervisor who knew everything,
and I was the young dumb medic who was like, sorry,
we pulled the gas line out of the gas station again,
and all the owners yelling at us, we want.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
To go through call.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Can you come deal with this?
Speaker 5 (25:54):
You know? But dan Quino's son actually worked in Sanrancisco
as a San Francisco firefighter or a paramedic and later
fire captain, and he's a great guy. And so I
approached his son, Nash, and was like, I'm writing this book,
I'm doing this thing. Do you think I could call
your dad and talk to him about EMS? And I
was really nervous when I first reached out to him
because he's just this really well known guy.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Everybody loves him. And he was awesome. I mean, he
came and met up with me.
Speaker 5 (26:22):
We talked for hours. He's become a real mentor and
close friend. I just wanted to interview him once or
twice for the book, and we sat for hours and
we ended up meeting up once every couple of weeks
the whole time I was working on the book, and
he'd give me advice, he'd tell me stories, we talked
about life. So he became a huge influence. And there
(26:43):
was a couple of different folks like that that I
looked up to for the book that were just that
just became real mentors. And even since the book has
come out, you know, there's another captain in s F.
Jim the Zacherley, who same idea. He's just been there forever.
Everybody knows him, everybody loves him, you know, he's everybody's
favorite old captain. And he read the book and loved
it and kind of took me on he basically adopted me,
(27:05):
and he's become a real mentor to And then in
terms of books that I read, I have, like I
don't know, a wheelbarrow full of books that I read
for research for the book. But one more I have
to mention, just because we brought up Freedom House, is
this woman, Emily Dunning Bearringer, who was actually New York's
(27:27):
first female ambulance surgeon. Back in like nineteen oh four,
they had the ambulances.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
This isn't the horsey and buggy days.
Speaker 5 (27:37):
The ambulances had a driver who didn't have any medical training,
but he knew how to handle a horse. It had
to be a guy who knew how to drive a
horse and handle a buggy. And then they would actually
put the interns at the medical schools, so as part
of your intern year, you were getting early experience and
you would go right around on the ambulance.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
And run calls.
Speaker 5 (27:56):
And so the first time they ever let a woman
do it, name is Emily Dunning Barringer, and she's amazing
and she ended up writing an autobiography about it, which
came out in the fifties.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
It's out of print.
Speaker 5 (28:09):
I saw some reference to it in another Ems book
I was reading and I was like, oh my god,
I have to find this woman's book. And I found
it on a rare books auction website for like a
hundred bucks.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
I had to bid on it. I'd never done anything
like that before, and it showed up and it's so good.
I want to reprint this book. It's a fun read.
It's amazing.
Speaker 5 (28:31):
She talks about driving around this is basically the lower.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
End of Manhattan in the nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 5 (28:38):
It was Bellevue Hospital and they're on the horse and
buggy and they're going down to the docks and they're
going into these like tenement buildings. It was the poor
area because that's where you always get the best experience.
And they're going on morphine poisonings, which is what they
called overdoses back then. So and that one I could
talk about for hours. I mean, that was just another
(28:59):
really rabbit hole that I wasn't expecting to find and
I ended up just diving way down it.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
And there's some stories about her in the book too.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
That's great.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
There's one story that kind of put me on a
like oh my god. And I want you to talk
about the poem and the type of writer.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Oh yeah, it's funny. There's a line actually.
Speaker 5 (29:24):
Pretty early in the book, in the introduction, where I'm
talking about what EMS is like, and I'm talking about
how personal and how visceral.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
It can be, what it's like to go into people's.
Speaker 5 (29:37):
Houses instead of having them brought to you as patients
and seeing you know, picture frames and sweatshirts and dog
food balls, and you're sort of rapid fire putting together
this image of a person in their life while you're
walking through the hallway on your way in to see
(29:58):
if they're alive or not. And so there's a line
I put it says, I once read half a poem
left in a dead woman's typewriter, And part of why
it's in there is just because it sounds cool. It's
just a good line. I like the way it sounds.
But yeah, I remember the call we were in. We
were in an apartment in Reno, and the apartment was
pretty rough, and it was it was just a doa
(30:22):
you know, or an obvious death, whatever you call it
in your system, which to me, those are actually, oddly enough,
those are some of my favorite calls.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
I just find them really fascinating.
Speaker 5 (30:35):
You know, so much of EMS is it's so intense,
it's so fast. You're always trying to figure out how
to solve.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
A problem without enough resources.
Speaker 5 (30:43):
You know, somebody's always yelling or vomiting, and you're just
kind of picking up the pieces and doing the best.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
You can, and you're in a hurry all the time.
Speaker 5 (30:49):
And then you get to an obvious death and it
feels like the clock stops. You know, you show up
and you've got all your bags, you've got all your gear.
You rush in the house and you look and you're like, oh,
we're not we're not working this, and then.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
All the systems that I've worked in.
Speaker 5 (31:06):
The next thing you have to do is you got
to call the cops, and then you just have to
wait until either the cops or the coroner can come by.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
And a lot of time you're waiting for like.
Speaker 5 (31:14):
Twenty minutes because you know they're busy, and it's you're
not in a hurry. And so it's one of the
few times in EMS where then, other than all times,
it's one of the few times in EMS where then
you just kind of sit there in an empty apartment
with a dead body for like a while, and it's
a really interesting moment, and we're not supposed to snoop
(31:37):
around their apartment.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
We all know that you're not supposed to.
Speaker 5 (31:41):
You're supposed to leave everything as is. You're not supposed
to touch anything. You're not supposed to look in any
of their stuff. It's kind of a no no. I'm
pretty sure it's illegal, but we all, we all do it.
You can't not at least take a lap and like
look around at stuff. You know, you don't touch anything
or move anything. But I think it's human nature to
(32:01):
walk around and see their clothing and their pictures.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
And their paintings on the walls. And I remember this
woman lying on the floor in.
Speaker 5 (32:08):
A different room and I was just trying to kind
of write down the scene and take some notes for
the corner, and there was half a poem sitting in a.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Typewriter, and I was like, don't read the poem.
Speaker 5 (32:18):
Don't read the poem. It's rude. You're snooping. And you know,
of course I read the poem. You got to read
the poem, and it was really beautiful. It was unfinished.
I'm not going to quote it because I think that's
like really illegal. And I didn't write it down or
take a picture or anything. So I don't remember the
exact words, but I just remember sitting there reading this
like half finished piece of art that was never going
(32:40):
to get finished. It was a very it was a
very ems moment, you know. It was kind of beautiful
and kind of tragic and kind of bittersweet and interesting
all at the same time, which I think is a
lot of what our job is.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Speaking about job and something that I've done throughout my
career and then when I was in North Carolin my
crews did on a regular basis, is that what the
public doesn't see is that we're also caretakers. Right we
go into the house and we will cook breakfast, or
(33:13):
we will change the laundry, or take groceries home from
a car accident because the husband and wife have to
go to the hospital and the husband doesn't want to
leave the groceries. But once ago with the wife, so
what do you do. You go and take the groceries.
They give you the keys to the to their house,
and you go in, you take the groceries, you put
them away, and then you go to the hospital and
drop off the keys. And these are things that the
(33:35):
public doesn't know, and that's nowhere written anywhere in any
empt paramedic, medical school textbooks or whatever. What do you
think about that? I mean, you mentioned that in the book,
you mentioned about that we are caretakers. It's one of
those I guess there's truths that only us in the
field understand and the public doesn't.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Yeah, No, I love that. I love that you brought
that up.
Speaker 5 (34:00):
I mean one of the big themes of the book,
and one of the things.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
I was trying to do with it.
Speaker 5 (34:07):
Is that there's there's this big idea, especially on TV,
that EMS and emergency and a lot of us think
this too when we're young. There's this big idea that
nine to one one it's all emergencies. Every call we
go to, somebody's having a heart attack, somebody just got shot,
and we run in with our sirens. Then we run
some emergency, we save someone's life, and then we go
(34:27):
on and we do the next one. And all of
us that actually work in EMS know that that could
not be farther from the truth. You know that those
those really critical, true, truly emergent calls are maybe five
percent of our call volume, and the other ninety five percent.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
Is just people who need help.
Speaker 5 (34:43):
The elderly, the homeless, the chronically ill, you know, mental illness,
folks that just kind of aren't able to figure.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
Out their own lives, and so they call us for help.
And that can be really frustrating.
Speaker 5 (35:00):
It can be really repetitive when we go on nine
one one calls for toe.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Pain or for empty prescription, you know, all night long.
Speaker 5 (35:06):
But it can also be like you said, we like
to think of ourselves as these kind of big, brave
emergency responders, but what we really are as caretakers. You know,
we're taking care of people that need extra help. And
sometimes they need extra help because they're having a really dramatic,
like life changing code through emergency.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
And sometimes they need extra help because.
Speaker 5 (35:29):
They just don't have anyone else to call, you know,
their life has kind of fallen apart. Either they're sick,
they're poor, maybe they're mean, maybe they're just I don't
know if I'm allowed to say asshole on your podcast,
but maybe they're just a big asshole and nobody else
wants to help them out.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
And so who do they call? They call us.
Speaker 5 (35:48):
And I actually think there's something really beautiful and really
honorable about the idea that when you are so mean
that no one else in your life is willing to
help you out, Like when you pissed off every single
other person in your life and you've burned every other
bridge and no one can help you.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
We will still show up.
Speaker 5 (36:06):
We will come even if you're mean, even if you
cuss us out.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Even if you call us for dumb stuff.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
We're still going to show up every single time because
that is our job.
Speaker 3 (36:15):
And we might complain about it, but we're probably going
to put your groceries away.
Speaker 5 (36:18):
We're probably still going to do it, you know. I
know the groceries you put that you mentioned putting away
are really beautiful. Sometimes we help folks out, So maybe
that's not the best way to say it, because I
really like putting away someone's groceries when they you know,
they're sick and they can't. But I mean, when when
somebody calls us for that, for that dumb stuff that
we hate.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
You know what I mean? Will you turn the light off.
I'm stuck in bed and I don't want to, and
we're like, we can't keep.
Speaker 5 (36:42):
Using nine on one for this, Mary, but we're still
going to do it. We still do it, you know,
and I think that's really cool.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
And like you said, we are we are caretakers.
Speaker 5 (36:52):
There's a whole bunch of people in the United States
that need a little extra help, and we like to
argue a lot about politics about the ways to best
help them as a society. But no matter what your
politics are, no matter what you think, the big picture
is of how to help them in the day to day,
in the actual moment. Folks that need extra help, they
(37:14):
call nine on one and we go help them. We're
the ones who actually do the work of helping folks,
you know, who really need it. And it's tough, it's frustrating,
it's insane, but it's really beautiful.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
I think it's really cool.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Staying on that same path remind me and we step
far beyond the nine one one call itself.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
And you just talked a lot about that.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
We're part healthcare worker, we're both provider, we're a social worker,
we're movers, we're witness and I think we're also a
silent witness of what goes on in the world in humanity,
and you share that pretty well in the book as well.
There are no clear cut heroes, there are no clear
cut I guess villains as well. We're just people doing
(37:58):
the job, which you just you just said so well
just a few minutes ago, and that sometimes we are
doing our best in a broken system.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (38:09):
Joe Conny in Bringing Out the Dead, he calls us
grief mops.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
He says, we are grief mops. And I actually I
almost wanted.
Speaker 5 (38:16):
To call the book grief Mop because I think it's
such an incredible description of what we do.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
And my editor was like, no, that's.
Speaker 5 (38:26):
Depressing and weird. We're not calling your book that. But yeah,
like you said, a lot of what we do is
we bear witness. You know, we go out, we see
people at their worst. We try our best to help
them in whatever way that we can. Usually it doesn't work,
but we're still there. We still tried, We still offered
a compassionate word when they were.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Having a bad day.
Speaker 5 (38:47):
One of the things that I really wanted to try
to do with the book is I think there's a
lot of truths that in ems.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
We kind of we take these truths to be self evident.
There's a lot of stuff in ems that we all
kind of know.
Speaker 5 (39:01):
We know that most of our calls aren't nine on
one emergencies. We know that a lot of our patients
can be really frustrating. We know that we carry the groceries,
that we see people's poems and their typewriters, that we
put food out for their pets, that we call their
Grandma because the prescription, Like we all know that amongst ourselves,
but I think the general public doesn't know that at all,
(39:21):
And it's something One of the things I wanted to
do with the book is I just kind of wanted
to tell the world about who we actually are and
what we actually do. And one of the things I
did while I was writing the book is I went.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Around to every EMT and paramedic I knew, and I.
Speaker 5 (39:35):
Said, what would you want to tell the world, Like,
let's say, you know, my book takes off and it's
some massive bestseller, which it is probably not going to be,
and everybody and all the famous people and all the
important people in the whole world read it. What do
you want to tell them? What do you want them
to know about ems? And then I would write down
their answers. Now that the book is out and I
have been talking to people, it's been really fascinating because
(39:57):
I have very different conversations about the book. If I'm
talking to somebody who's kind of in our world, versus
if I'm talking to somebody who's out in the general public.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
When I'm talking to.
Speaker 5 (40:06):
Folks that in our that are that are sort of
speak our language and have done the job, we have
conversations like you and I have. We talk about the
different places I've worked, we talk about types of calls.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
It's really fun, it's really interesting, and they're like, wow, cool,
Like it's it's been mostly good feedback.
Speaker 5 (40:20):
People have said, you know, it's the full representation of
the work, Thanks for doing it.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
And then when I talk to people.
Speaker 5 (40:26):
Who have not worked in EMS, who don't know anything
about EMS, their minds are blown They're.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Like, I had no idea. This is so crazy. I
didn't know the job was like this. Oh my god,
the system's so messed up. You guys are doing all
this other stuff that's not medical.
Speaker 5 (40:43):
You're waiting in lines at the hospitals it's also and
they're just totally freaking blown away. And so one of
the big things I wanted to do is I wanted
to try to kind of capture the.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Most complete picture that I could.
Speaker 5 (40:56):
Of what it's really like to do the job, what
it really feels like to be an ems not just
a collection of war stories, but like, here's people who
have been doing this longer than me, Here's people who
are newer than me. Here's what this was like back
in history. Here's here's calls with homeless people. Here's calls
with shootings, Here's calls with.
Speaker 3 (41:15):
With the emotions.
Speaker 5 (41:16):
Here's what it's like when you get burned out and
you're dragging along and your back hurts and your part,
you know what I mean. And I just tried to
take all these different images of what of like a
whole picture of the job, not just the part we
see in Hollywood, and put it together in a way
so that people who haven't done the job would get
to absorb it a little bit. And that that was
(41:36):
the big challenge, And that part's been really interesting of
having the book come out and have people talk to.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
It, seeing seeing what the what the.
Speaker 5 (41:43):
Reaction is from folks who really had no idea about
any of this stuff.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
You know, I want to.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Touch back a little bit about your time. It's San
Francisco and a couple of reasons why. One is uh,
I'm seeing I watched three runs of Emergency on a
pretty regular basis and I just I always have fun. Actually,
I had Randolph Mantooth. He was my thirtieth episode, and
that's a that's another story. But yeah, yeah, yeah, go
(42:14):
back and listen to that one. I was told I
was gonna have about thirty minutes with him, and it
was about forty three minutes of airtime and non recording.
We had about a fifteen to twenty minute conversation just
him and I and I was like, I was just
in heaven.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
I really was.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
It was like, oh my god, I can't believe him
talking to Johnny Gage and it was like it was
just fantastic. And he was probably my hardest guest to
ever get. Yeah, it just but it took me. It
took me almost seven or six seven months before finally
the land him to find a good contact. But yeah,
go back, and that's my that's my most popular podcast
(42:53):
that gets lots of downloads and lots of listeners. And
when I don't have anything to put up, I put
that one back up because it just gets a lot
of things. It gets a lot of downloads and listens,
so everybody. But the think about it is they were
just in they were just in San Francisco, But tell
me about your experience.
Speaker 5 (43:11):
And San Francisco is its own beast, Like I said,
but before San Francisco, I had worked in Santa Cruz
and Reno, which both have more urban areas, more rural areas,
different populations, you know, a lot of really different kinds
of people, sort of more standard EMS calls, and San
Francisco is is very much its own beast. Like there's
(43:33):
about there's about a million people when the city's asleep,
and two or three times out on a big weekend
or on a big work day or when there's a
big conference or something in town, and they're all crammed
into a really small, really geographically small area. There's a
lot of we call them SROs in the city single
(43:54):
room occupancy, but there's a lot of different nicknames. There's
a lot of these big, old, like one hundred year
old old kind of hotel tenement buildings with a lot
of single rooms, bathrooms.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
Down the hall.
Speaker 5 (44:06):
A lot of them are either government assisted or they're
just real cheap, and so that's where most of the
a lot of the EMS calls are. And then you've
got more residential out by the beach. You've got your
financial district and your high rise. And I found that
in San Francisco there's not a lot of middle class
(44:28):
and working class folks in San Francisco. There's a couple
neighborhoods down south that are still pretty working class, but
for the most part, in San Francisco, you've got wealthy
people and completely destitute. There's not a lot of in between.
We have a large homeless population. We have a lot
ofth a lot of fentanyl, a lot of homeless encampments,
(44:49):
and a lot of folks living in the SROs and
in those tenement buildings who you know, don't have a
penny to their name. And then everybody else is pretty wealthy,
and we get a lot of tourists from other places.
So it's just it's really crowded. You see a lot
of calls. There's a bunch of hospitals. The hospitals are
extremely overwhelmed. We have pretty bad wall times and diversions,
(45:13):
so it's really common when you get a patient the
first thing you do is call around to see which
hospitals are even open that day, because they're constantly going
on and off to earth. There's not a lot of
car crashes because there's not that many places in the
city where you can get a car going fast enough
to flip it, so we don't actually run a lot
of high speed car trast is. We get a lot
(45:35):
of low speed, a lot of auto peds, but not.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
A lot of high speed. And we have a hugely.
Speaker 5 (45:41):
High proportion of altered and agitated and drug related calls.
I was actually working in San Francisco when fentanyl first hit, and.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
It was really dramatic. It was really really dramatic. We
were running a lot of overdoses every day.
Speaker 5 (45:57):
And you can blame the politics for the fact that
it's a port city with nice weather and we get
a lot of the drugs imported first off the ocean.
But yeah, there's a there's a really really big population
of folks that live either in the SROs or live outside,
and that's a big part of our call volume is
dealing with mental illness, dealing with agitation, and I actually
(46:20):
spent about two years on the on one of the
street crisis teams.
Speaker 3 (46:24):
It's a lot of places are doing stuff like this now.
Speaker 5 (46:26):
It's one of those new community medicine programs where we
were dedicated to homelessness, mental illness, and drug calls out
in the street, and that was a really interesting job.
It was exhausting, it was very very emotionally draining, and
a lot of folks we were not really able to
help in a meaningful way, and so it was just
kind of a lot of cycling and trying to, you know,
(46:47):
move a pile of hay with a needle.
Speaker 3 (46:49):
I don't think that's the right metaphor a big pile
of sand one great at a time.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (46:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:58):
But it's also a really tight knit place. It is
like anywhere the community.
Speaker 5 (47:02):
The folks I worked with out there, there's a real
real brotherhood. You get really really tight with the folks
you work with. And I love the EMTs and medics
out there, you know where you're kind of out in
it together every day, and we just got really really
closely bonded, and I really look up to a lot
of them.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
The Real Emergency isn't just a memoir about you, and well,
it is memoirs about you, but it's really, I think
a mirror reflecting on the state of modern emergency medical services.
And I think you combine your words of wisdom and
your field experience and compassion and it just makes it
an unflinching and honest book about what EMS is all about.
(47:44):
And I just you know, I think that people should
go out and get it and read it. You don't
have to be in emergency medical services, but if you are,
I think you will really enjoy this book. Where can
I get it?
Speaker 3 (47:56):
Thank you so much for all of the nice words.
I really appreciate that. That was the goal, was to
try to kind of capture it. The best way to
get the book is to go.
Speaker 5 (48:04):
Into your favorite local independent bookstore and just ask them.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
It's called The Real Emergency.
Speaker 5 (48:09):
My name is Joanna Socleskol. It's available on all the
major places that you buy books. It's on Amazon, It's
on Barnes and Noble. It was published by Penguin Random House.
So anywhere usually buy books, you should be able to.
But I love local bookstores and I love the idea
that my book would someday.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
Show up in local bookstores.
Speaker 5 (48:30):
One of the best moments of me of this whole process,
by far as when I went into Green Apple, which
is one of my favorite bookstores in the city, and
they had it out on the front table, which was
like always one of my goals in life was to
see my book on the front table the bookstore, go
in and ask them, tell them about it.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
And one thing I want to mention too is that
we did an audiobook and it was really fun.
Speaker 5 (48:51):
We put a lot of effort into recording it and
trying to make it cool. It's mostly my voice, but
then there's some voice actors for some of the interviews,
and I really love doing that. And I mentioned it
especially on your podcast, because I know a lot of
ems people are book listeners, not necessarily book readers. A
lot of us have long commutes and short attention spans,
so if you are interested in listening to it instead
(49:13):
of reading it, we put a lot of work into that,
and it's on Spotify, it's on Audible, and you are
very much encouraged to get the audiobook and or the
paper version.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
Is there another book in the works?
Speaker 3 (49:25):
God No, completely not, man. I know, I love writing.
I'm going to keep journals. I might do some more essays.
Speaker 5 (49:37):
But I really had something to say and I said it.
You know, I really feel like I said what I
had to say in this book, and I hope people
like it.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
I really do.
Speaker 1 (49:47):
That's great.
Speaker 2 (49:48):
Well, until next time, I'm Steve Cohen Madgematic Podcast is
here for you. Joanna. I want to thank you very
much for joining me. Go out and get the book.
Speaker 3 (49:57):
Thank you so much. This was really really fun. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
This episode of Medical Metic Podcast is brought to you
by Magical Destinations by Steve. You're a trusted travel advisor
for Disney Cruises Worldwide Hawaii ventures. When it comes to
take a break, that well earned break is for you
and I can help you do that. So reach out
to me at Medical Destinations by Steve dot com. And
you can reach me at s Coen at Curated Travel
(50:22):
Collection dot com to talk about travel. And of course
if you want to reach out to me and talk
about Magnematic Podcasts, that email is medical Metic Podcasts at
gmail dot com. It's Medic the number two medic podcast.
And again, thank you very much. Thanks Johanna, thank you
so much
Medica.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
Medica is probably sponsored by Magical Destinations by Steve, where
your next vacation is not just a trip, it is
a story waiting to be told, whether it's Disney, a cruise,
or a dream getaway across the globe. Let Magical Destinations
by Steve turn your travel jeams into lasting memories. You
can reach out to Magical Destinations by Steve at s
Cohen at created Travel Collection dot com. Now let's get
(00:23):
started and Welcome to Medic the Medic podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
Co mid gating.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Attention.
Speaker 4 (00:36):
All listeners on this frequency stand by for.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
An important announcement.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Welcome to Medic to Medic podcast, the weekly podcast for
EMS providers, EMS leaders, EMS, medical directors and others involved
in or those who have an interest in emergency medical services.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Ladies and gentlemen, here's your host, Steve.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Cohen, coming from the Fern Down Medical Medic Podcast Studios.
It's another fine podcast of medic Do Medic Hi, I'm
your host, Steve Cohen. You can reach me at Medical
Medic Podcasts at gmail dot com. You can download this
podcast as well as others at Apple Podcasts, Podbeans, Spotify,
(01:19):
Speaker dot com. And I am so happy to be back.
As you know, Medical Medic Podcasts is a place where
we share the stories of ems, the professionals, the stories,
the triumphs, the heartache, and everything in between. I'm so
happy to welcome my guest today who has written one
(01:40):
of the most honest and haunting portraits of our EMS world.
For fifteen years, Joanna Soko lived in the life of
a street medic, documenting her experiences and notebooks on scraps
of paper, even the backs of gloves. Those reflections became
the foundation of her new book, Our Real Emergency Stories
from the Ambulance. Welcome to Medical Medic Podcast.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Thank you so much, happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, you're writing just doesn't capture what we do as
medics and EMTs. It captures who we are. It's compassion,
there's some flaws, and also the human touch. I really
do appreciate that honest, opinion and honest writing that you
have put into your book.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
So again, welcome. I always like to start out with
tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 5 (02:24):
Yeah, like you said, I'm a street medic. I know
a lot of the guests you've had on the show
have really long and impressive EMS pedigrees, and I don't
have that. I have not been a chief. I have
not been a CEO of anything.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
I worked for. I got my EMT pretty young.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
Early twenties, like a lot of us, and I spent
four or five years doing sort of a smattering of
part time EMT jobs.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
I was a wilderness responder, as a ski patroller, I
did special.
Speaker 5 (02:57):
Events, so a lot of the kind of classic I
did a little bit if T, and then once I
met to medic school, I spent about ten years in
the nine on one system. I was a paramedic on
the ambulance in three different counties, Santa Cruz, California, Reno, Nevada,
and then spent the bulk of my career and the
EMS division of the SFFD in San Francisco with the
(03:19):
San Francisco Fire Department, did a little bit of community
medicine at the end, and the book was kind of
in my back pocket. I think, like most EMTs and medics,
we all collect stories, whether we want to or not.
You know, we're just out there seeing these really intense
parts of life and death. And I was always a
journaler and a note taker. It's just like what I
did with my brain at the end, of the day,
(03:39):
the way that I would sort out all the information
as I would take notes, and so the last year
or two I got the opportunity to put them together
into an essay collection and it was a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
But yeah, I've really just.
Speaker 5 (03:53):
Been an EMT in a street medic for about fifteen years.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
That's pretty much my whole pedigree, my whole career.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
There's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
But I really want to go back to I guess
the beginning and what was your calling. I know that
in your book you describe yourself as an adverse black
sheep and a family of academics. I guess it's a
fascinating backdrop to how you eventually found you're calling an EMS.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
So tell us a little bit about that. Thank you.
Speaker 5 (04:23):
Yeah, I have to say, since you asked about it.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
My mom was really annoyed with me that I called
her an academic. She got really offended by that, and
I was like, father, what to say? You taught at
UCU Berkeley for like ten years. What do you want
me to put And.
Speaker 5 (04:38):
She was like, I'm fine because my mom was actually
a field journalist for most of her career.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
She was like, I had a job, I was out
in the field. I was working.
Speaker 5 (04:45):
I wasn't sitting in some dusty office. And then my
dad too had a super impressive career, and I always really.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Liked science and medicine.
Speaker 5 (04:56):
I figured I would go off to college and go
into science and medicine and either do research or maybe
medical school. And I found when I got to college.
I went to a really competitive biology program that was
pretty well known at UBC University, British Columbia, and I
found that I got there.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
I really liked the science.
Speaker 5 (05:16):
I loved the information that I was learning, but I
could not sit still in a classroom for like ten
hours a day and study, which I think I teach
EMTs and medics now for a living at a community college.
That's kind of how I make my live in these days.
And I think that's really common, you know, Whenever I
tell the kids that in the classroom, Ember and starts laughing,
because I think that's how many many EMTs and medics
(05:37):
get into this job. We like science, we like medicine,
we like helping people, and we are extremely bad at
sitting still. So I was in college trying to get
this biology degree, and I was staring out the window
at the mountains and the snow, and I wanted to
go snowboarding. I wanted to go to concerts. I wanted
to go out into the world and see what there
was to see. And I had a really hard time
(05:58):
just sitting in the library watching the world go buy
out the window, and so I ended.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Up dropping out of school. I went back, I dropped
out again, and eventually I took an EMT class.
Speaker 5 (06:09):
And I would say the second day of my EMT class,
I was like, Oh, this is what i'mou do for
a living, this is who I am.
Speaker 3 (06:16):
I didn't have any.
Speaker 5 (06:19):
Paramedics or firefighters or nurses at all in my family history.
Like I said, my dad was in law, my mom's
a journalist. You know, it wasn't something that I was
familiar with. But I love adrenaline, I love science. I
love helping people. And when I saw the way that
EMT class worked, it was so immediate, you.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Know, it was so visceral.
Speaker 5 (06:39):
It wasn't We're going to sit here and memorize these
like hormone cascades for a month.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
And a half.
Speaker 5 (06:43):
It was here's how to stop bleeding, here's how to
start a heart again. You know, you're going to go
out into the street on your hands and knees literally
sometimes and you're gonna use your body to help people
in real time. And I just thought that was the
coolest thing I'd ever heard. And I was like, oh, yeah,
we're doing this, and I pretty much never looked back.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Well, let me just share a quick antidote because I
kind of followed the.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Same path where my dad.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
My dad was a pharmacist, my mom was a school teacher.
My brother was a star athlete and also very smart.
He was did very well in his SATs and had
all kinds of scholarships and all that. And me, I
was struggling through school as it was in high school,
and I didn't know what I was going to do,
(07:32):
but I did go to I started my freshman year
at Duquanne University in Pittsburgh. At the end of that
freshman year, my QPA was one point eight. Yeah, there
you go, right, I dropped up. I dropped out.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
I actually also had a high achieving older brother.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
But so, I mean, so we had that path, So
I keep going. I my dad had a heart attack.
My dad's technician and orderly and stepped out unit because
back then you stayed in the hospital for six or
seven days when you had a heart attack. Ed Ed
Brinkley was his name, and Ed was an EMT and
(08:10):
a suburb outside of Pittsburgh, and they started talking. My
dad always very friendly and talk to people, and my
dad heard Dad. I said, you know, my son likes
to show emergency. Is that something that you maybe could
talk him about? One thing that I to another end.
I started my career as a volunteer with no certification. Okay,
I had six months before I went to EMT school.
(08:30):
But long story short, I've been doing this for forty
three years, and because of my dad's heart attack and
Ed Brinkley, I've been in this business. People say EMS
is not a career. It's been a great career for me.
I have nothing but good things to say about emergency
medical services and it's been great for me. I dropped
out of school.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
I did.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
My parents let me drop out, but I promising might
get a degree, which I did eventually after fourteen years
and two kids.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
So I did.
Speaker 2 (08:55):
I did get a degree, and I'm happy about that
because I did. It open up a bunch of doors
for me. I'm a firm believer in education. But okay,
that's enough about me. And I don't like talking about
me on the podcast, Like no, I love that.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
I love hearing it. I one of the things they
did for my book was interviewed a bunch of other
e mts and medics. I really like having not.
Speaker 5 (09:13):
Just my own voice, but hearing how other people got
into this and how other people did it. And I
feel like there's two really common paths to EMS. One
is the folks who basically grow up, they're born into it,
you know, they have they have parents or uncles or
aunts who are nurses and firefighters and cops, and they're like,
I'm gonna I'm gonna do this for a living, and
me a firefighter.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
That's who I am. That's what I'm gonna do. And
they get in really young.
Speaker 5 (09:35):
And then I feel like a lot of other folks
that I've talked to just kind of fall into it.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
They try to do other things for a living.
Speaker 5 (09:42):
It doesn't really work, they don't they don't feel right
about it, and then they get into EMS and they're like, oh, yeah,
this is a job. You know.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
I've met a lot of a.
Speaker 5 (09:51):
Lot of folks like that who sort of tried to
take a more traditional path and couldn't hang because you know,
we have the attention span of four year old puppies.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Yes, I understand, and that's why when you were telling
your story at the beginning, it's why I was smiling
because our pastors are parallel. I know, people can't see
me smiling and didn't see you telling the story because
as I promised that, we were both smiling.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
So it was really good.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
You've worked in some really unique places Reno with the
casinos as well, and of course you spent the walk
of your time in San Francisco. It's a wide range
of different areas. Why don't you talk about that experience.
Let's start with Reno. How'd you get to Reno and
what was it like?
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah, i'd love to I actually grew up in Oakland.
Speaker 5 (10:39):
Yeah, and then I've been in Santa Cruz for a
long time now, but I did, which is relevant to
Reno because I was such a city kid.
Speaker 3 (10:46):
I grew up in.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
Oakland, the Bay Area, late nineties, early two thousands. It
was just like it was a really fun place.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
It was kind of rough, very vibrant, and I went to.
Speaker 5 (10:55):
Reno because I got my medic shirt at a time.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
And it was really hard to get a job. It was.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
It was very competitive and you had to go get experience,
especially in the Bay Area in California, it was it
was competitive, and so.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I basically just kept asking.
Speaker 5 (11:12):
Friends from farther and farther away, you know, do you
know anywhere that's hiring?
Speaker 3 (11:15):
Where do I go? What do I do?
Speaker 5 (11:16):
And I ended up finding an agency that was hiring
in Reno, Nevada. It was Remza in Reno, and I
went out there pretty blind.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
I really had no idea what I was in for.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
I had done my schooling and internship in Santa Cruz,
and I'd worked a bunch of part time jobs, and
I got out there and Reno is amazing. I fell
in love. I love that town. I still go out
there probably once a month, whenever I can handle the drive.
It's a huge catchment zone. So we had the city
(11:48):
of Reno and Sparks, and then all of Washoe County,
which actually goes all the way up to the Oregon
border and almost all the way down to Carson and
then out to the California border.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
So you had it.
Speaker 5 (12:01):
Was an incredibly exhausting, challenging, fun place to work as
a new medic You had all the problems of a
major city. Like you mentioned, the casinos are there. It's
a big, rowdy it's kind of a smaller, almost more
deserty version of Vegas. You know, people come out there
on purpose to make bad decisions, and so the casinos
(12:26):
get really really rowdy. People go up there, they don't
realize they're at high altitude, they don't bring their medications.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
They party real hard.
Speaker 5 (12:34):
And then you also had a ton of trailer parks.
You had a ton of kind of suburban area out
in the Reno.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
And Washo, and then it actually got really rural.
Speaker 5 (12:42):
I got a little taste of rural ms, which is
a really different flavor and it's really fun. We went
about two three hours out into the desert and there
was some reservation land, there.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Was some small towns. There was these like.
Speaker 5 (12:56):
Empty desert ranches where you're going out there dual response
with a helicopter and you're talking to the helicopter on
the repeater with each other to try to figure out
the mile marker, to get the right dirt road, to
go up the right desert canyon ridge, to find some
ranch where you go in and there's a bunch of
signs that are like no trespassers, no visitors, we don't
call nine one one, you know, And then you get
(13:18):
out there and someone's sick or someone's having something going wrong.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
So it was very busy. Like I learned later that
pretty much every system I've ever worked in is understaffed,
but so that wasn't unique. But it was pretty.
Speaker 5 (13:30):
Understaffed when I was there, and you just got a
ton of experience in the first two years I was
a medic.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
I ran a lot of calls, I saw a lot
of stuff. It was really fun. I love the people
that I worked with out there.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
I want to get back to San Francisco a little bit.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
But I, like you said, you grew up in Oakland
and you got your EMT and going to be a
medic school, went off to Reno as well, and those
experiences they're so different.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
How did you shape you as a paramedic.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
I mean, that's a great question. They were really different.
Speaker 5 (14:04):
And I came to San Francisco last, right, And San
Francisco's a.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Really unique system. I think, like a lot of big.
Speaker 5 (14:12):
City systems, it's got a lot of the same problems
that a lot of big city systems do we've got.
Really SF is a really famous city and it's a
really populated city, but it's also a very small city.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
It's actually only seven by seven square miles.
Speaker 5 (14:27):
It's like a tiny little peninsula, and so you're twenty
minutes from everything.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
All our hospitals are really close together.
Speaker 5 (14:33):
You've got twelve hospitals in basically a twenty thirty minute
like area that you can drive around, and so all
your transport times are really fast. There's a ton of staff,
there's a bunch of medics, it's mostly als. Our protocols
are pretty narrow because there's always somebody with more experience
than you. There's always a supervisor on their way, there's
(14:55):
always like another engine medic, there's always something to bounced
something off of, and you're always, you know, ten fifteen
minutes from the hospital. And so having my first experience
be out in Reno, which was almost the opposite from that.
You're running calls in Reno sometimes where you're two hours
from a hospital with like a volunteer crew who maybe
has a decade old first responder license but doesn't even
(15:16):
have their empt and you're the only medic on scene.
Speaker 3 (15:19):
So it taught me learning how.
Speaker 5 (15:21):
To become a medic in Reno taught me a lot.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Of self reliance.
Speaker 5 (15:24):
And it's not that medics in San Francisco don't have that,
but I did notice sometimes when I got to the city,
there were things that I trusted myself to do. There
were things that they had already had that sense of
independence and trust, where it was like, and we'll figure
it out, like we can make this work, you know.
And I think Reno really taught me to be adaptable
and to be self reliant because you just had We
(15:45):
had a lot of really crazy calls out there. You know,
you're going from somebody in a casino hotel who took
way too much of whatever, and they're super super altered
and agitated. They're fighting like six cops. There's broken bottles everywhere.
So you're working that call, and then the next call,
you're you know, an hour and a half out into
the desert with somebody who seems like they're having a
(16:06):
cardiac event.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
But it's snowing, so.
Speaker 5 (16:08):
You can't get the helicopter to fly, so you've got
to figure out what to do with them. And so
we just saw a lot. I think it was a
really great training ground and when I came to San Francisco,
I had a really great basis of that independence and
that self reliance that I think some of the medics
that grow up in more crowded places don't always necessarily
it takes them longer to get there.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Just get off the subject for a second.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Why I'm looking looking behind me is that you say
you have a stubborn dog. Well, my executive producer here
is Bailey Bell. She's a four year old golden and
every time she hears your voice, her tail is just
wagged and I'm like, yeah, she's coming over a little bit.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
But yeah, she was.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
I was.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
I'm hearing this cat cat tap.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
I'm going I'm starting to mean to interrupt the podcast,
but at all producer of the executive producer, to make
sure I'm doing everything right as well. All right, Well,
I appreciate that description and how you know, kind of
shaped your role and how you became so confident. But
one thing that really struck me in your book is
(17:17):
your honesty about the abusive love affair that you had
with the job. You call ems addictive, and see if
I'm accurate on this. You said abusive love affair you
had with the job you called ems both addictive and damaging,
you know, and I think a lot of us in
the field kind of understand that.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
What the tension and instantly.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
The gratification and disappointment comes with it. What really made
you finally decide to write the book? I know there's
multiple questions in.
Speaker 5 (17:49):
There, but yeah, absolutely, no, I do think the job
is addictive and damaging. I think a lot of us
can probably relate to that. And one of the themes
of the book is how fun and rewarding and beautiful
it is, and also how it destroys your body.
Speaker 3 (18:05):
And mind over time.
Speaker 5 (18:07):
But in terms of what made me write the book,
a friend of mine told me once, they say, you
write your first book when you can't not anymore, when
you just like can't hold it in anymore. And so
what happened with me is I'd been carrying around stories
(18:29):
for years and years, and I was taking notes. The
stack of notebooks was getting taller, the stories were getting heavier.
It started to feel like it was physically heavy to
carry around all these stories inside my head and inside
my dot and I just wanted them out of me.
In some ways, I think in a lot of ways,
writing a book is.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
A really selfish process. There's a lot of ego, you know,
you just have all this stuff inside of you that
you want to put out into the world.
Speaker 5 (18:56):
And I had been taking notes, and I'd also been
reading and doing a lot of research. I learned a
lot about other EMS systems, about back in the horse
and buggy days, you know, before we had motors. I
find something really romantic about horse drawn ambulances.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
I loved learning about those.
Speaker 5 (19:14):
I learned about the early cholera days, when we first
started putting together our new ambulance systems and response to
colera epidemics in New York. I learned about the Freedom
House Project, and you know, Kevin Hazard's books incredible, and
so I was just kind of carrying around this heavier
and heavier pile, and there was something that I really
wanted to say about EMS. I just I think it's
(19:38):
such an incredible career, and I think a lot of
the depictions there's there's been some really cool memoirs written
about EMS, but I think most of the depictions we
see of it in the media are total nonsense. And
we all know that I keep having these conversations over
and over again with my coworkers. You know, we're standing
line at the hospital or whatever, and we're just like, man,
(19:59):
if you pople knew what this job really was, you know,
nobody knows what this actually is.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
And so I finally got to a point where I
was like, well, what if we tell them? I want to.
Speaker 5 (20:08):
And the big reason I wrote the book was just
that I got lucky one of my very very best
friends who I've known since we were eighteen years old,
our whole lives.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
We kind of grew up.
Speaker 5 (20:19):
I went into ems and paramedicine and she went into
writing and editing and publishing for a living, and that
was just the job that she went into. And we
were really close and we would talk about life and work.
We talked on the phone all the time, and she
would say, you should really write a book about this stuff.
You should write about this stuff. We should write essays.
We wrote a couple essays together and they were really
fun and they did pretty well.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
And then eventually she got in a position.
Speaker 5 (20:42):
Where she was working for Penguin Random House, for a
publishing company, and part of her job involved finding new
writers and new voices and new books.
Speaker 3 (20:50):
And so yeah, so it was tall.
Speaker 5 (20:52):
People ask how I got a book deal, and it
was just dumb luck. Like that's how it's because I
happened to make friends with Hailey Cullingham in first year
of You because she was the only other girl awake
in my dorm room at three in the morning that
wanted to hang.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
Out with me.
Speaker 5 (21:06):
But she was standing outside and I struck up a
conversation and we were best friends ever since. And so
when she was working for Penguin and we we had
this idea. By then, I had a stack of notebooks
and journals that was, you know, three feet high, and
all these stories I've been gathering in interviews and research,
and we pitched.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
The book together. We wrote a proposal together, and.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
We pitched it to her bosses, and you know, they
bought it, and so we got to do this project together.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
That was really fun.
Speaker 5 (21:35):
And when I wrote the book, I kind of had
two parallel lines of thought.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
One of them was, you know, maybe I'll.
Speaker 5 (21:43):
Write this book about ems and how beautiful and how
screwed up.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
This job is, and we'll get a little bit of
recognition for what we.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
Do, and people will see how hard this job is
and put a little bit more value in ems and
we'll fix everything and change the world. But that was
always just kind of a ridiculous pipe dream. And the
other line I thought the bigger thing was just I
really want to work on this project with my best
friend for fun, and maybe some people will read it
and they'll think it's cool, and.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Maybe no one will read it.
Speaker 5 (22:11):
But either way, I'll be able to take these stories
that I've been gathering for my whole career and we'll
be able to put him together into a cool shape
and see if we can make something cool out of them.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Absolutely great that Haley was your best friend and she
really helped you along this way. Were there any other
ms or authors as you talked about. You mentioned Kevin.
Kevin's been on my podcast twice now, when you first
book came out, and then when he wrote about Freedom
House and John Moon. John Moon and I worked together.
John and Moon was one of my cheeks.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
You mentioned Pittsburgh.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yeah, And the thing about it is I did not
appreciate when I was working for the city of Pittsburgh,
cause I worked with a handful of Freedom House paramedics
and I just did not appreciate it as I do today.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
I've had a few of them on in the past
as well.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
But yeah, Freedom House is just because the Freedom House
doesn't start, I never get into the city of Pittsburgh,
and so it means a lot to me. Plus I
was stationed in the Hill District where Freedom House was. Wow,
so there's that connection. And I worked Medic five, which
was in the Hill district and still in the Hill District,
and so it was just a lot of that. And
(23:22):
did you talk to any authors before you start to
write this or get some ideas? Did you talk to
Kevin or did you talk to anybody?
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Kevin and I have emailed, we still haven't actually met.
I would love to someday.
Speaker 5 (23:33):
I basically wrote him like some fan mail and I
when I first had my manuscript, one of the things
you do when you first get done with the book
is you try to sell it. You try to send
copies to other writers who are more famous than you
so that they'll write.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
You blurbs, write the little quotes on the front of
the book that are like this book was good. I'm
famous from Kevin Hazard, you know. So I wrote him a.
Speaker 5 (23:54):
Letter that was basically half fan mail and half.
Speaker 3 (23:58):
Like I did a thing. Will you read my thing
maybe and say that it's good. And he was.
Speaker 5 (24:02):
Incredibly nice and super gracious. He wrote me back, he
said really nice things about the.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Book, and so we've emailed a little bit.
Speaker 5 (24:07):
I'd love to meet him someday, and so, yeah, his
book was a big influence. I am kind of I
can be a little bit introverted.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
I did a lot of reading.
Speaker 5 (24:18):
I read a ton of books when I was getting
ready for mine, and most of the people that I
talked to were just other EMS professionals, and so I
reached out to folks that I knew, folks that I'd
work with. One of the really big influences on the
book was there's a guy in the book featured pretty
(24:38):
heavily named dan Quino, and he is not nationally famous,
but in Santa Cruz he's an absolute legend.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
And one thing I think is really cool about.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
EMS is every EMS system has this guy or a
guy like this, somebody who's been in the system for
forty years.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
He knows everybody who's been working their butt off the
whole time.
Speaker 5 (24:58):
We have them.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
In San Francisco, you got I'm.
Speaker 5 (25:00):
In Reno, and in Santa Cruz it's dan Quino he's
been working there for thirty forty years. He's an amazing guy.
He's an incredible medic. Everybody kind of knows him. He
was actually there when they were first building AMR. I
didn't realize this until I was interviewing him, but the
guy who first put together AMR was actually working in
(25:21):
Santa Cruz at the time, and he was gathering up
a couple of little companies from the Santa Cruz, Sanatra area,
and so that was really cool.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
And so I knew Quino briefly from.
Speaker 5 (25:33):
My time working for him as a medic, and I
was a brand new medic.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
I think I pissed him off a couple times.
Speaker 5 (25:38):
He was sort of the gruff supervisor who knew everything,
and I was the young dumb medic who was like, sorry,
we pulled the gas line out of the gas station again,
and all the owners yelling at us, we want.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
To go through call.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Can you come deal with this?
Speaker 5 (25:54):
You know? But dan Quino's son actually worked in Sanrancisco
as a San Francisco firefighter or a paramedic and later
fire captain, and he's a great guy. And so I
approached his son, Nash, and was like, I'm writing this book,
I'm doing this thing. Do you think I could call
your dad and talk to him about EMS? And I
was really nervous when I first reached out to him
because he's just this really well known guy.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
Everybody loves him. And he was awesome. I mean, he
came and met up with me.
Speaker 5 (26:22):
We talked for hours. He's become a real mentor and
close friend. I just wanted to interview him once or
twice for the book, and we sat for hours and
we ended up meeting up once every couple of weeks
the whole time I was working on the book, and
he'd give me advice, he'd tell me stories, we talked
about life. So he became a huge influence. And there
(26:43):
was a couple of different folks like that that I
looked up to for the book that were just that
just became real mentors. And even since the book has
come out, you know, there's another captain in s F.
Jim the Zacherley, who same idea. He's just been there forever.
Everybody knows him, everybody loves him, you know, he's everybody's
favorite old captain. And he read the book and loved
it and kind of took me on he basically adopted me,
(27:05):
and he's become a real mentor to And then in
terms of books that I read, I have, like I
don't know, a wheelbarrow full of books that I read
for research for the book. But one more I have
to mention, just because we brought up Freedom House, is
this woman, Emily Dunning Bearringer, who was actually New York's
(27:27):
first female ambulance surgeon. Back in like nineteen oh four,
they had the ambulances.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
This isn't the horsey and buggy days.
Speaker 5 (27:37):
The ambulances had a driver who didn't have any medical training,
but he knew how to handle a horse. It had
to be a guy who knew how to drive a
horse and handle a buggy. And then they would actually
put the interns at the medical schools, so as part
of your intern year, you were getting early experience and
you would go right around on the ambulance.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
And run calls.
Speaker 5 (27:56):
And so the first time they ever let a woman
do it, name is Emily Dunning Barringer, and she's amazing
and she ended up writing an autobiography about it, which
came out in the fifties.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
It's out of print.
Speaker 5 (28:09):
I saw some reference to it in another Ems book
I was reading and I was like, oh my god,
I have to find this woman's book. And I found
it on a rare books auction website for like a
hundred bucks.
Speaker 3 (28:22):
I had to bid on it. I'd never done anything
like that before, and it showed up and it's so good.
I want to reprint this book. It's a fun read.
It's amazing.
Speaker 5 (28:31):
She talks about driving around this is basically the lower.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
End of Manhattan in the nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 5 (28:38):
It was Bellevue Hospital and they're on the horse and
buggy and they're going down to the docks and they're
going into these like tenement buildings. It was the poor
area because that's where you always get the best experience.
And they're going on morphine poisonings, which is what they
called overdoses back then. So and that one I could
talk about for hours. I mean, that was just another
(28:59):
really rabbit hole that I wasn't expecting to find and
I ended up just diving way down it.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
And there's some stories about her in the book too.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
That's great.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
There's one story that kind of put me on a
like oh my god. And I want you to talk
about the poem and the type of writer.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
Oh yeah, it's funny. There's a line actually.
Speaker 5 (29:24):
Pretty early in the book, in the introduction, where I'm
talking about what EMS is like, and I'm talking about
how personal and how visceral.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
It can be, what it's like to go into people's.
Speaker 5 (29:37):
Houses instead of having them brought to you as patients
and seeing you know, picture frames and sweatshirts and dog
food balls, and you're sort of rapid fire putting together
this image of a person in their life while you're
walking through the hallway on your way in to see
(29:58):
if they're alive or not. And so there's a line
I put it says, I once read half a poem
left in a dead woman's typewriter, And part of why
it's in there is just because it sounds cool. It's
just a good line. I like the way it sounds.
But yeah, I remember the call we were in. We
were in an apartment in Reno, and the apartment was
pretty rough, and it was it was just a doa
(30:22):
you know, or an obvious death, whatever you call it
in your system, which to me, those are actually, oddly enough,
those are some of my favorite calls.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
I just find them really fascinating.
Speaker 5 (30:35):
You know, so much of EMS is it's so intense,
it's so fast. You're always trying to figure out how
to solve.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
A problem without enough resources.
Speaker 5 (30:43):
You know, somebody's always yelling or vomiting, and you're just
kind of picking up the pieces and doing the best.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
You can, and you're in a hurry all the time.
Speaker 5 (30:49):
And then you get to an obvious death and it
feels like the clock stops. You know, you show up
and you've got all your bags, you've got all your gear.
You rush in the house and you look and you're like, oh,
we're not we're not working this, and then.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
All the systems that I've worked in.
Speaker 5 (31:06):
The next thing you have to do is you got
to call the cops, and then you just have to
wait until either the cops or the coroner can come by.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
And a lot of time you're waiting for like.
Speaker 5 (31:14):
Twenty minutes because you know they're busy, and it's you're
not in a hurry. And so it's one of the
few times in EMS where then, other than all times,
it's one of the few times in EMS where then
you just kind of sit there in an empty apartment
with a dead body for like a while, and it's
a really interesting moment, and we're not supposed to snoop
(31:37):
around their apartment.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
We all know that you're not supposed to.
Speaker 5 (31:41):
You're supposed to leave everything as is. You're not supposed
to touch anything. You're not supposed to look in any
of their stuff. It's kind of a no no. I'm
pretty sure it's illegal, but we all, we all do it.
You can't not at least take a lap and like
look around at stuff. You know, you don't touch anything
or move anything. But I think it's human nature to
(32:01):
walk around and see their clothing and their pictures.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
And their paintings on the walls. And I remember this
woman lying on the floor in.
Speaker 5 (32:08):
A different room and I was just trying to kind
of write down the scene and take some notes for
the corner, and there was half a poem sitting in a.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Typewriter, and I was like, don't read the poem.
Speaker 5 (32:18):
Don't read the poem. It's rude. You're snooping. And you know,
of course I read the poem. You got to read
the poem, and it was really beautiful. It was unfinished.
I'm not going to quote it because I think that's
like really illegal. And I didn't write it down or
take a picture or anything. So I don't remember the
exact words, but I just remember sitting there reading this
like half finished piece of art that was never going
(32:40):
to get finished. It was a very it was a
very ems moment, you know. It was kind of beautiful
and kind of tragic and kind of bittersweet and interesting
all at the same time, which I think is a
lot of what our job is.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Speaking about job and something that I've done throughout my
career and then when I was in North Carolin my
crews did on a regular basis, is that what the
public doesn't see is that we're also caretakers. Right we
go into the house and we will cook breakfast, or
(33:13):
we will change the laundry, or take groceries home from
a car accident because the husband and wife have to
go to the hospital and the husband doesn't want to
leave the groceries. But once ago with the wife, so
what do you do. You go and take the groceries.
They give you the keys to the to their house,
and you go in, you take the groceries, you put
them away, and then you go to the hospital and
drop off the keys. And these are things that the
(33:35):
public doesn't know, and that's nowhere written anywhere in any
empt paramedic, medical school textbooks or whatever. What do you
think about that? I mean, you mentioned that in the book,
you mentioned about that we are caretakers. It's one of
those I guess there's truths that only us in the
field understand and the public doesn't.
Speaker 3 (33:57):
Yeah, No, I love that. I love that you brought
that up.
Speaker 5 (34:00):
I mean one of the big themes of the book,
and one of the things.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
I was trying to do with it.
Speaker 5 (34:07):
Is that there's there's this big idea, especially on TV,
that EMS and emergency and a lot of us think
this too when we're young. There's this big idea that
nine to one one it's all emergencies. Every call we
go to, somebody's having a heart attack, somebody just got shot,
and we run in with our sirens. Then we run
some emergency, we save someone's life, and then we go
(34:27):
on and we do the next one. And all of
us that actually work in EMS know that that could
not be farther from the truth. You know that those
those really critical, true, truly emergent calls are maybe five
percent of our call volume, and the other ninety five percent.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
Is just people who need help.
Speaker 5 (34:43):
The elderly, the homeless, the chronically ill, you know, mental illness,
folks that just kind of aren't able to figure.
Speaker 3 (34:53):
Out their own lives, and so they call us for help.
And that can be really frustrating.
Speaker 5 (35:00):
It can be really repetitive when we go on nine
one one calls for toe.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Pain or for empty prescription, you know, all night long.
Speaker 5 (35:06):
But it can also be like you said, we like
to think of ourselves as these kind of big, brave
emergency responders, but what we really are as caretakers. You know,
we're taking care of people that need extra help. And
sometimes they need extra help because they're having a really dramatic,
like life changing code through emergency.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
And sometimes they need extra help because.
Speaker 5 (35:29):
They just don't have anyone else to call, you know,
their life has kind of fallen apart. Either they're sick,
they're poor, maybe they're mean, maybe they're just I don't
know if I'm allowed to say asshole on your podcast,
but maybe they're just a big asshole and nobody else
wants to help them out.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
And so who do they call? They call us.
Speaker 5 (35:48):
And I actually think there's something really beautiful and really
honorable about the idea that when you are so mean
that no one else in your life is willing to
help you out, Like when you pissed off every single
other person in your life and you've burned every other
bridge and no one can help you.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
We will still show up.
Speaker 5 (36:06):
We will come even if you're mean, even if you
cuss us out.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
Even if you call us for dumb stuff.
Speaker 5 (36:11):
We're still going to show up every single time because
that is our job.
Speaker 3 (36:15):
And we might complain about it, but we're probably going
to put your groceries away.
Speaker 5 (36:18):
We're probably still going to do it, you know. I
know the groceries you put that you mentioned putting away
are really beautiful. Sometimes we help folks out, So maybe
that's not the best way to say it, because I
really like putting away someone's groceries when they you know,
they're sick and they can't. But I mean, when when
somebody calls us for that, for that dumb stuff that
we hate.
Speaker 3 (36:37):
You know what I mean? Will you turn the light off.
I'm stuck in bed and I don't want to, and
we're like, we can't keep.
Speaker 5 (36:42):
Using nine on one for this, Mary, but we're still
going to do it. We still do it, you know,
and I think that's really cool.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
And like you said, we are we are caretakers.
Speaker 5 (36:52):
There's a whole bunch of people in the United States
that need a little extra help, and we like to
argue a lot about politics about the ways to best
help them as a society. But no matter what your
politics are, no matter what you think, the big picture
is of how to help them in the day to day,
in the actual moment. Folks that need extra help, they
(37:14):
call nine on one and we go help them. We're
the ones who actually do the work of helping folks,
you know, who really need it. And it's tough, it's frustrating,
it's insane, but it's really beautiful.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
I think it's really cool.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Staying on that same path remind me and we step
far beyond the nine one one call itself.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
And you just talked a lot about that.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
We're part healthcare worker, we're both provider, we're a social worker,
we're movers, we're witness and I think we're also a
silent witness of what goes on in the world in humanity,
and you share that pretty well in the book as well.
There are no clear cut heroes, there are no clear
cut I guess villains as well. We're just people doing
(37:58):
the job, which you just you just said so well
just a few minutes ago, and that sometimes we are
doing our best in a broken system.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (38:09):
Joe Conny in Bringing Out the Dead, he calls us
grief mops.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
He says, we are grief mops. And I actually I
almost wanted.
Speaker 5 (38:16):
To call the book grief Mop because I think it's
such an incredible description of what we do.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
And my editor was like, no, that's.
Speaker 5 (38:26):
Depressing and weird. We're not calling your book that. But yeah,
like you said, a lot of what we do is
we bear witness. You know, we go out, we see
people at their worst. We try our best to help
them in whatever way that we can. Usually it doesn't work,
but we're still there. We still tried, We still offered
a compassionate word when they were.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Having a bad day.
Speaker 5 (38:47):
One of the things that I really wanted to try
to do with the book is I think there's a
lot of truths that in ems.
Speaker 3 (38:55):
We kind of we take these truths to be self evident.
There's a lot of stuff in ems that we all
kind of know.
Speaker 5 (39:01):
We know that most of our calls aren't nine on
one emergencies. We know that a lot of our patients
can be really frustrating. We know that we carry the groceries,
that we see people's poems and their typewriters, that we
put food out for their pets, that we call their
Grandma because the prescription, Like we all know that amongst ourselves,
but I think the general public doesn't know that at all,
(39:21):
And it's something One of the things I wanted to
do with the book is I just kind of wanted
to tell the world about who we actually are and
what we actually do. And one of the things I
did while I was writing the book is I went.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
Around to every EMT and paramedic I knew, and I.
Speaker 5 (39:35):
Said, what would you want to tell the world, Like,
let's say, you know, my book takes off and it's
some massive bestseller, which it is probably not going to be,
and everybody and all the famous people and all the
important people in the whole world read it. What do
you want to tell them? What do you want them
to know about ems? And then I would write down
their answers. Now that the book is out and I
have been talking to people, it's been really fascinating because
(39:57):
I have very different conversations about the book. If I'm
talking to somebody who's kind of in our world, versus
if I'm talking to somebody who's out in the general public.
Speaker 3 (40:05):
When I'm talking to.
Speaker 5 (40:06):
Folks that in our that are that are sort of
speak our language and have done the job, we have
conversations like you and I have. We talk about the
different places I've worked, we talk about types of calls.
Speaker 3 (40:15):
It's really fun, it's really interesting, and they're like, wow, cool,
Like it's it's been mostly good feedback.
Speaker 5 (40:20):
People have said, you know, it's the full representation of
the work, Thanks for doing it.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
And then when I talk to people.
Speaker 5 (40:26):
Who have not worked in EMS, who don't know anything
about EMS, their minds are blown They're.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Like, I had no idea. This is so crazy. I
didn't know the job was like this. Oh my god,
the system's so messed up. You guys are doing all
this other stuff that's not medical.
Speaker 5 (40:43):
You're waiting in lines at the hospitals it's also and
they're just totally freaking blown away. And so one of
the big things I wanted to do is I wanted
to try to kind of capture the.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Most complete picture that I could.
Speaker 5 (40:56):
Of what it's really like to do the job, what
it really feels like to be an ems not just
a collection of war stories, but like, here's people who
have been doing this longer than me, Here's people who
are newer than me. Here's what this was like back
in history. Here's here's calls with homeless people. Here's calls
with shootings, Here's calls with.
Speaker 3 (41:15):
With the emotions.
Speaker 5 (41:16):
Here's what it's like when you get burned out and
you're dragging along and your back hurts and your part,
you know what I mean. And I just tried to
take all these different images of what of like a
whole picture of the job, not just the part we
see in Hollywood, and put it together in a way
so that people who haven't done the job would get
to absorb it a little bit. And that that was
(41:36):
the big challenge, And that part's been really interesting of
having the book come out and have people talk to.
Speaker 3 (41:41):
It, seeing seeing what the what the.
Speaker 5 (41:43):
Reaction is from folks who really had no idea about
any of this stuff.
Speaker 3 (41:48):
You know, I want to.
Speaker 2 (41:50):
Touch back a little bit about your time. It's San
Francisco and a couple of reasons why. One is uh,
I'm seeing I watched three runs of Emergency on a
pretty regular basis and I just I always have fun. Actually,
I had Randolph Mantooth. He was my thirtieth episode, and
that's a that's another story. But yeah, yeah, yeah, go
(42:14):
back and listen to that one. I was told I
was gonna have about thirty minutes with him, and it
was about forty three minutes of airtime and non recording.
We had about a fifteen to twenty minute conversation just
him and I and I was like, I was just
in heaven.
Speaker 1 (42:29):
I really was.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
It was like, oh my god, I can't believe him
talking to Johnny Gage and it was like it was
just fantastic. And he was probably my hardest guest to
ever get. Yeah, it just but it took me. It
took me almost seven or six seven months before finally
the land him to find a good contact. But yeah,
go back, and that's my that's my most popular podcast
(42:53):
that gets lots of downloads and lots of listeners. And
when I don't have anything to put up, I put
that one back up because it just gets a lot
of things. It gets a lot of downloads and listens,
so everybody. But the think about it is they were
just in they were just in San Francisco, But tell
me about your experience.
Speaker 5 (43:11):
And San Francisco is its own beast, Like I said,
but before San Francisco, I had worked in Santa Cruz
and Reno, which both have more urban areas, more rural areas,
different populations, you know, a lot of really different kinds
of people, sort of more standard EMS calls, and San
Francisco is is very much its own beast. Like there's
(43:33):
about there's about a million people when the city's asleep,
and two or three times out on a big weekend
or on a big work day or when there's a
big conference or something in town, and they're all crammed
into a really small, really geographically small area. There's a
lot of we call them SROs in the city single
(43:54):
room occupancy, but there's a lot of different nicknames. There's
a lot of these big, old, like one hundred year
old old kind of hotel tenement buildings with a lot
of single rooms, bathrooms.
Speaker 3 (44:05):
Down the hall.
Speaker 5 (44:06):
A lot of them are either government assisted or they're
just real cheap, and so that's where most of the
a lot of the EMS calls are. And then you've
got more residential out by the beach. You've got your
financial district and your high rise. And I found that
in San Francisco there's not a lot of middle class
(44:28):
and working class folks in San Francisco. There's a couple
neighborhoods down south that are still pretty working class, but
for the most part, in San Francisco, you've got wealthy
people and completely destitute. There's not a lot of in between.
We have a large homeless population. We have a lot
ofth a lot of fentanyl, a lot of homeless encampments,
(44:49):
and a lot of folks living in the SROs and
in those tenement buildings who you know, don't have a
penny to their name. And then everybody else is pretty wealthy,
and we get a lot of tourists from other places.
So it's just it's really crowded. You see a lot
of calls. There's a bunch of hospitals. The hospitals are
extremely overwhelmed. We have pretty bad wall times and diversions,
(45:13):
so it's really common when you get a patient the
first thing you do is call around to see which
hospitals are even open that day, because they're constantly going
on and off to earth. There's not a lot of
car crashes because there's not that many places in the
city where you can get a car going fast enough
to flip it, so we don't actually run a lot
of high speed car trast is. We get a lot
(45:35):
of low speed, a lot of auto peds, but not.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
A lot of high speed. And we have a hugely.
Speaker 5 (45:41):
High proportion of altered and agitated and drug related calls.
I was actually working in San Francisco when fentanyl first hit, and.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
It was really dramatic. It was really really dramatic. We
were running a lot of overdoses every day.
Speaker 5 (45:57):
And you can blame the politics for the fact that
it's a port city with nice weather and we get
a lot of the drugs imported first off the ocean.
But yeah, there's a there's a really really big population
of folks that live either in the SROs or live outside,
and that's a big part of our call volume is
dealing with mental illness, dealing with agitation, and I actually
(46:20):
spent about two years on the on one of the
street crisis teams.
Speaker 3 (46:24):
It's a lot of places are doing stuff like this now.
Speaker 5 (46:26):
It's one of those new community medicine programs where we
were dedicated to homelessness, mental illness, and drug calls out
in the street, and that was a really interesting job.
It was exhausting, it was very very emotionally draining, and
a lot of folks we were not really able to
help in a meaningful way, and so it was just
kind of a lot of cycling and trying to, you know,
(46:47):
move a pile of hay with a needle.
Speaker 3 (46:49):
I don't think that's the right metaphor a big pile
of sand one great at a time.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (46:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:58):
But it's also a really tight knit place. It is
like anywhere the community.
Speaker 5 (47:02):
The folks I worked with out there, there's a real
real brotherhood. You get really really tight with the folks
you work with. And I love the EMTs and medics
out there, you know where you're kind of out in
it together every day, and we just got really really
closely bonded, and I really look up to a lot
of them.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
The Real Emergency isn't just a memoir about you, and well,
it is memoirs about you, but it's really, I think
a mirror reflecting on the state of modern emergency medical services.
And I think you combine your words of wisdom and
your field experience and compassion and it just makes it
an unflinching and honest book about what EMS is all about.
(47:44):
And I just you know, I think that people should
go out and get it and read it. You don't
have to be in emergency medical services, but if you are,
I think you will really enjoy this book. Where can
I get it?
Speaker 3 (47:56):
Thank you so much for all of the nice words.
I really appreciate that. That was the goal, was to
try to kind of capture it. The best way to
get the book is to go.
Speaker 5 (48:04):
Into your favorite local independent bookstore and just ask them.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
It's called The Real Emergency.
Speaker 5 (48:09):
My name is Joanna Socleskol. It's available on all the
major places that you buy books. It's on Amazon, It's
on Barnes and Noble. It was published by Penguin Random House.
So anywhere usually buy books, you should be able to.
But I love local bookstores and I love the idea
that my book would someday.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
Show up in local bookstores.
Speaker 5 (48:30):
One of the best moments of me of this whole process,
by far as when I went into Green Apple, which
is one of my favorite bookstores in the city, and
they had it out on the front table, which was
like always one of my goals in life was to
see my book on the front table the bookstore, go
in and ask them, tell them about it.
Speaker 3 (48:45):
And one thing I want to mention too is that
we did an audiobook and it was really fun.
Speaker 5 (48:51):
We put a lot of effort into recording it and
trying to make it cool. It's mostly my voice, but
then there's some voice actors for some of the interviews,
and I really love doing that. And I mentioned it
especially on your podcast, because I know a lot of
ems people are book listeners, not necessarily book readers. A
lot of us have long commutes and short attention spans,
so if you are interested in listening to it instead
(49:13):
of reading it, we put a lot of work into that,
and it's on Spotify, it's on Audible, and you are
very much encouraged to get the audiobook and or the
paper version.
Speaker 1 (49:22):
Is there another book in the works?
Speaker 3 (49:25):
God No, completely not, man. I know, I love writing.
I'm going to keep journals. I might do some more essays.
Speaker 5 (49:37):
But I really had something to say and I said it.
You know, I really feel like I said what I
had to say in this book, and I hope people
like it.
Speaker 3 (49:45):
I really do.
Speaker 1 (49:47):
That's great.
Speaker 2 (49:48):
Well, until next time, I'm Steve Cohen Madgematic Podcast is
here for you. Joanna. I want to thank you very
much for joining me. Go out and get the book.
Speaker 3 (49:57):
Thank you so much. This was really really fun. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
This episode of Medical Metic Podcast is brought to you
by Magical Destinations by Steve. You're a trusted travel advisor
for Disney Cruises Worldwide Hawaii ventures. When it comes to
take a break, that well earned break is for you
and I can help you do that. So reach out
to me at Medical Destinations by Steve dot com. And
you can reach me at s Coen at Curated Travel
(50:22):
Collection dot com to talk about travel. And of course
if you want to reach out to me and talk
about Magnematic Podcasts, that email is medical Metic Podcasts at
gmail dot com. It's Medic the number two medic podcast.
And again, thank you very much. Thanks Johanna, thank you
so much
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Ruthie's Table 4
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home. On River Cafe Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers. Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt, and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks. Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation. For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/ Web: https://rivercafe.co.uk/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/therivercafelondon/ Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/ For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iheartradio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.