Saturday, September 19, 2009

Quote of the Day (Chris Jones, on the Unlikely Optimism of Paramedics)


“I expected to find a bunch of burnouts dragging through the graveyard shift, broken men and women who dipped into the blue bag so they might find sleep. But paramedics are a surprisingly sunny bunch. They understand that it's all so much randomness anyway, a cosmic confluence of vectors….Paramedics… know what a genuinely bad day really looks like, and they know that day will come for them, too, but today is not that day.”—Chris Jones, “The Strange Happiness of the Emergency Medic,” Esquire, August 2009

This evening, returning home from Mass, I saw a man on the steps outside church, with what appeared to be a relative and paramedics around him. It reminded me of just how unexpected medical emergencies can be—and of how much we owe paramedics.

Several times over the last few times, I’ve had reason to thank God that calm, knowledgeable, deeply kind volunteers were there when a close relative had a health emergency.

Jones’ first-person account (later used in the Aug. 28-Sept. 4 issue of The Week Magazine) of serving with a local Canadian ambulance corps (or, as they call it up there, “the truck”) shows, in riveting detail, what life can be like for those who serve in this capacity—from the “barrel-over-the-falls effect” that can overwhelm unwary rookies, to the calls that keep these workers awake for hours, to the exhilarating feeling after some calls that somehow, they had “turned a man’s heart back into a pump and his lungs back into oxygen tanks.”

This past week, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article on how, one year after the market meltdown, young people are rethinking the value of a career in finance. How many of these people, however, have thought about helping in the kind of capacity filled by a paramedic? It may not be remunerative as the world sees it, but what, I ask you, can be more valuable than saving a life?

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