Author : Kit Wharton
Publisher : HarperCollins UK
Page : 179 pages
File Size : 43,72 MB
Release : 2017-02-09
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0008188610
A glimpse into the extraordinary world of ambulance driving from the man behind the wheel. ‘Heart-stopping, eye-opening and jaw-dropping. Sometimes painful, sometimes sad, often very, very funny’ Craig Brown
Author : Kate Black
Publisher : Independently Published
Page : 90 pages
File Size : 38,50 MB
Release : 2019-08-23
Category :
ISBN : 9781688201101
I initially started writing certain things down to help me cope with the horror of what I had been exposed to, as well as to capture the beautiful moments that I wanted to treasure and make sure I would never forget. I decided to make the leap from random thoughts to publishing, because I believe a lot of positivity could come from sharing the experiences I have had. I hope that this book can give people a better understanding of some of what we go through after we choose to dedicate our lives to the happiness, madness, sadness, terror and elation that this career provides. For the families of the Medics, the support you give to us, is what helps us get through the bad times. Some Medics don't share their day with their families to shield them from the pain they see and feel. It doesn't mean they don't want to share their day with you - it just means that sometimes things are too painful. Sometimes all we want to do is focus on the life and joy that is surrounding us. For me, simple things like having an undisturbed coffee with the ones I treasure in my life is all I need to comfort me and stick my broken bits together again. I'm sorry I get frustrated when I arrive home from a night shift and you are multitasking having your morning coffee with me, and mundane chores. I had a bad call last night, and I just wanted to look at you, see you smile, and tell you how thankful I am to have you in my life. I'm sorry I cause fights while we share that coffee, sometimes I'm not very good at expressing myself and all I'm trying to say is, "Please just STOP for 5 minutes, I need you now.". I'm sorry you get annoyed when I make you a cup of tea that is too hot to drink, I just want that cup of tea together to last forever.
Author : John Rushton
Publisher :
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 50,23 MB
Release :
Category :
ISBN : 9781520340388
"Thursday evening we had a shout at about 2030hrs to a Major Catastrophe at the Mulberry Bush Pub in the City Centre, Bomb gone off. We knew that this was the big one. We turned out on blues and twos, I tried to tell control that we were mobile but the radio was going crazy, we could not get a word in so we did not bother we just responded, travelling in silence each wrapped up in his own thoughts, I'm sure my mate was thinking the same as me, neither of us had ever dealt with anything like this. We knew it was bad because control had told us that they were sending in everything. Upon our arrival we learned that the Fire Brigade had, before our arrival, asked for assistance from the Taxi Drivers who were very helpful but in the big scheme of things it turned out to be a hindrance. I can understand the need to get casualties away as soon as possible but from an operational point it created more difficulty's than could be envisaged at the time.....As I looked around me at the Site it was sheer carnage, it's ok to talk about Triage, that is the method of taking away the most critical patients first but how do you begin when you are looking at a pile of about 50 bodies, dead and dying and all the walking wounded who are scattered around a large area, with some trying to extricate themselves from under the Bodies that were piled up on top of them?"
Author : Janice Ballenger
Publisher : Masthof Press & Bookstore
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 25,92 MB
Release : 2008-10
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1601261438
When Janice Ballenger joined a volunteer rescue company, she began keeping a journal, and clipping news articles about the calls she responded to. Now, as an EMT and deputy coroner, she has seen, smelled and touched things most people have difficulty just hearing about. With the thought of "There's nothing worse that I can see," she continued her job. The Nickel Mines Amish School shootings in October 2006, changed that, when a milk truck driver shot ten Amish girls, and killed himself. Read her story as one of the few people who entered the schoolhouse with the bodies inside. (286pp. Masthof Press, 2008.)
Author : Anita Leslie
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 38,65 MB
Release : 2017-08-24
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1448216672
ONE OF HAY FESTIVAL'S 100 BEST BOOKS WRITTEN BY WOMEN IN THE LAST 100 YEARS. 'The most gripping piece of war reportage I have ever read. What a writer! Her observations, mixed with dry humour and compassion, place her at the heart of the conflict and somehow apart from it, as a good historian should be. Remarkable.' Joanna Lumley Train to Nowhere is a memoir of war seen through the sardonic eyes of Anita Leslie, a funny and vivacious young woman who reports on her experiences with a dry humour, finding the absurd alongside the tragic. Daughter of a Baronet and first cousin once removed to Winston Churchill, Lelsie joined the Mechanized Transport Corps as a fully trained mechanic and ambulance driver during World War II, serving in Libya, Syria, Palestine, Italy, France and Germany. Ahead of her time, Anita bemoans 'first-rate women subordinate to second-rate men', and, as the British Army forbade women from serving at the front, joined the Free French Forces in order to do what she felt was her duty. Writing letters in Hitler's recently vacated office and marching in the Victory parade contrast with observations of seeing friends murdered and a mother avenging her son by coldly shooting a prisoner of war. Unflinching and unsentimental, Train to Nowhere is a memoir of Anita's war, one that, long after it was written, remains poignant and relevant.
Author : Jane Stern
Publisher : Crown
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 46,66 MB
Release : 2004-04-27
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1400048699
The basis for the movie starring Kathy Bates, Ambulance Girl is an inspiring story by a woman who found, somewhat late in life, that “in helping others I learned to help myself.” Jane Stern was a walking encyclopedia of panic attacks, depression, and hypochondria. Her marriage of more than thirty years was suffering, and she was virtually immobilized by fear and anxiety. As the daughter of parents who both died before she was thirty, Stern was terrified of illness and death, and despite the fact that her acclaimed career as a food and travel writer required her to spend a great deal of time on airplanes, she suffered from a persistent fear of flying and severe claustrophobia. Yet, this fifty-two-year-old writer decided to become an emergency medical technician. Stern tells her story with great humor and poignancy, creating a wonderful portrait of a middle-aged, Woody Allen–ish woman who was “deeply and neurotically terrified of sick and dead people,” but who went out into the world to save other people’s lives as a way of saving her own. Her story begins with the boot camp of EMT training: 140 hours at the hands of a dour ex-marine who took delight in presenting a veritable parade of amputations, hideous deformities, and gross disasters. Jane—overweight and badly out of shape—had to surmount physical challenges like carrying a 250-pound man seated in a chair down a dark flight of stairs. After class she did rounds in the emergency room of a local hospital. Each call Stern describes is a vignette of human nature, often with a life in the balance. From an AIDS hospice to town drunks, yuppie wife beaters to psychopaths, Jane comes to see the true nature and underlying mysteries of a town she had called home for twenty years. Throughout the book we follow her as she gets her sea legs, bonds with the firefighters who become her colleagues, and eventually, comes to be known as Ambulance Girl.
Author : Mike Scardino
Publisher : Little, Brown
Page : 221 pages
File Size : 39,82 MB
Release : 2018-07-17
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0316469602
An adrenaline-fueled read that will stay with you long after you turn the final page, Bad Call is a "compulsively readable, totally unforgettable" memoir about working on a New York City ambulance in the 1960s (James Patterson). Bad Call is Mike Scardino's visceral, fast-moving, and mordantly funny account of the summers he spent working as an "ambulance attendant" on the mean streets of late-1960s New York. Fueled by adrenaline and Sabrett's hot dogs, young Mike spends his days speeding from one chaotic emergency to another. His adventures take him into the middle of incipient race riots, to the scene of a plane crash at JFK airport and into private lives all over Queens, where New Yorkers are suffering, and dying, in unimaginable ways. Learning on the job, Mike encounters all manner of freakish accidents (the man who drank Drano, the woman attacked by rats, the man who inflated like a balloon), meets countless unforgettable New York characters, falls in love, is nearly murdered, and gets an early and indelible education in the impermanence of life and the cruelty of chance. Action-packed, poignant, and rich with details that bring Mike's world to technicolor life, Bad Call is a gritty portrait of a bygone era as well as a bracing reminder that, though "life itself is a fatal condition," it's worth pausing to notice the moments of beauty, hope, and everyday heroism along the way.
Author : James McGrath Morris
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 389 pages
File Size : 20,6 MB
Release : 2017-03-28
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0306823845
After meeting for the first time on the front lines of World War I, two aspiring writers forge an intense twenty-year friendship and write some of America's greatest novels, giving voice to a "lost generation" shaken by war. Eager to find his way in life and words, John Dos Passos first witnessed the horror of trench warfare in France as a volunteer ambulance driver retrieving the dead and seriously wounded from the front line. Later in the war, he briefly met another young writer, Ernest Hemingway, who was just arriving for his service in the ambulance corps. When the war was over, both men knew they had to write about it; they had to give voice to what they felt about war and life. Their friendship and collaboration developed through the peace of the 1920s and 1930s, as Hemingway's novels soared to success while Dos Passos penned the greatest antiwar novel of his generation, Three Soldiers. In war, Hemingway found adventure, women, and a cause. Dos Passos saw only oppression and futility. Their different visions eventually turned their private friendship into a bitter public fight, fueled by money, jealousy, and lust. Rich in evocative detail -- from Paris cafes to the Austrian Alps, from the streets of Pamplona to the waters of Key West -- The Ambulance Drivers is a biography of a turbulent friendship between two of the century's greatest writers, and an illustration of how war both inspires and destroys, unites and divides.
Author : Jennifer Murphy
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 594 pages
File Size : 22,53 MB
Release : 2021-04-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1643136836
One woman's incredible story of life on the front lines as an emergency medical worker in New York City. On the streets of New York City, EMTs and paramedics do more than respond to emergencies; they eat and drink together, look out for each other’s safety, mercilessly make fun of one another, date one other, and, most crucially, share terrifying experiences and grave injustices suffered under the city’s long-broken EMS system. Their loyalty to one another is fierce and absolute. As Jennifer Murphy shows in the gripping and moving First Responder, they are a family. A dysfunctional family, perhaps, but what family isn't? Many in the field of pre-hospital emergency care have endured medical trauma and familial hardship themselves. Some are looking to give back. Some are desperate for family. Some were inspired by 9/11. Still others want to become doctors, nurses, firefighters, cops, and want to cut their teeth on the streets. As rescuers, they never want people to die or get hurt. But if they are going to die or get hurt, first responders want to be there. Despite the vital role they play New York City, EMTs are paid less than trash collectors, and far less than any other first responder makes, even though the burden of medical emergencies fall on the backs of EMTs and medics. Yet for Jennifer and her brothers and sisters, it's a calling more than a job. First responders are constantly exposed to infectious diseases, violence, and death. The coronavirus pandemic did not change that math; the public is just more aware of it. After 9/11, EMT training schools experienced a surge in applications from civilians wanting to become first responders, inspired by rescuers who responded to the terrorist attacks and rushed into the burning towers when everyone else ran out. The same will almost certainly be true post-coronavirus as people are moved by a desire to help in times of crisis in a more direct way. Funny and heartwarming, inspiring and poignant, First Responder follows Jennifer's journey to becoming an EMT and working during and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic. She will bring readers inside an intense world filled with crisis, rescue, grief, uncertainty, and dark humor. First Responder will move readers to a greater understanding and appreciation of those fighting for them—wherever they live—in a world they hardly know or could imagine.
Author : John Dos Passos
Publisher : Open Road Media
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 19,41 MB
Release : 2015-05-12
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1504011430
A record of his childhood, young adulthood, and twenties, The Best Times is a collage of cherished memories. He reflects on the joys of an itinerant life enriched by new and diverse friendships, customs, cultures, and cuisines. Luminary personalities and landscapes abound in the 1920s literary world Dos Passos loved. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Horsley Gantt—they are his beloved friends. Spain, the French Riviera, Paris, Persia, the Caucasus—they are his beloved footpaths.
