Paramedic: On the Front Lines of Medicine

Paramedic: On the Front Lines of Medicine

In this unforgettable, dramatic account of one man's experience as an EMT, Peter Canning relives the nerve-racking seconds that can mean the difference between a patient's death and survival, as Canning struggles to make the right call, dispense the right medication, or keep a patient's heart beating long enough to reach the hospital. As Canning tells his graphic, gripping war stories--of the lives he saved and lost; of the fear, the nightmares, and the constant adrenaline-pumping thrill of action--we come away with an unforgettable portrait of what it means to be a hero. Canning's "book is both a personal story and a vivid portrait of his profession, one that despite its importance is often taken for granted.... PARAMEDIC deepened my appreciation for the work paramedics do". -- The Washington Post rgettable, dramatic account of one man's experience as an EMT, Peter Canning relives the nerve-racking seconds that can mean the difference between a patient's death and survival, as Canning struggles to make the right call, dispense the right medication, or keep a patient's heart beating long enough to reach the hospital. As Canning tells his graphic, gripping war stories--of the lives he saved and lost; of the fear, the nightmares, and the constant adrenaline-pumping thrill of action--we come away with an unforgettable portrait of what it means to be a hero. rgettable, dramatic account of one man's experience as an EMT, Peter Canning relives the nerve-racking seconds that can mean the difference between a patient's death and survival, as Canning struggles to make the right call, dispense the right medication, or keep a patient's heart beating long enough to reach the hospital. As Canning tells his graphic, gripping war stories--of the lives he saved and lost; of the fear, the nightmares, and the constant adrenaline-pumping thrill of action--we come away with an unforgettable portrait of what it means to be a hero. Peter Canning is a full-time paramedic in Hartford, Connecticut. In addition to his government jobs, he has worked as a cabdriver, cook, meatpacker, telephone solicitor, book reviewer, and laborer. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Canning is currently at work on a novel about EMS. The City   I head south on Interstate 91 (I-91) on this January morning. It is a drive I have made many times over the years, first as a child coming to the city from the suburbs to visit my father at his office in Constitution Plaza. He’d take me shopping at G. Fox, Korvette’s, and Herb’s Sports Shop, and then to dinner at Honess’s, where we would eat bluefish and steamed clams, or to Valle’s for steaks. Later I drove to work myself, parking on the capitol grounds and entering that grand building on the hill with the gold dome where I worked for the governor. From the distance, above the countryside, Hartford’s skyline rises as impressive as the Land of Oz or the metropolis protected by Superman. I used to think of the city as a symbol of all that was good with America—progress, jobs. Yet I knew for all the light, there were also shadows. In 1968 when I was ten, the north end of the city was racked with riots in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. One morning our biweekly cleaning woman who came from Hartford got out of her car, drunk and shouting that she wouldn’t get on her knees “to clean no floors for no white woman.” One year a coworker of my father’s had a bullet pierce a window of his station wagon on his commute to work, forcing my father and others to start using an alternate route. In later years working for Senator, then Governor Weicker, I accompanied him into the city’s poorer areas and saw the poverty through the windshield of our escorted car. And I researched and wrote the speeches, the ones that cited the fact that Hartford, despite being the capital of one of the wealthiest states in the union, was one of the country’s ten poorest cities, that its infant mortality rate rivaled that of third-world nations, that its schools were segregated and failed miserably to provide their students with equal educational opportunity.   In recent years, in Shakespeare’s words, “sorrows” have come to Hartford, not as “single spies, but in battalions.” The city’s manufacturing base, which fueled its growth for nearly a century, is gone. The insurance companies and financial institutions that are at the city’s heart have undergone mergers, major downsizing, and layoffs. Long-standing stores and restaurants, like some of the ones my father took me to, have closed their doors forever. As the city’s tax base has eroded, the number of those needing assistance has risen dramatically. Crime, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, AIDS, and other diseases are at epidemic levels. Today Hartford’s population—its lowest since World War I—is predominantly black and Hispanic. The blacks live largely in the north end along North Main Street and Albany Avenue in crumbling private homes and apartment building