Friday nights

I haven’t seen anyone die. I want to say that first, because what follows isn’t mine in the way it would be if I had.

Every day I pull on the uniform. I run at three in the morning in the station gym, and I think things through while I run. There is a particular quality to thinking at that hour, in that building, with the rig sitting quiet in the bay on the other side of the wall. The thoughts come slower and they come more honestly. I have done some of my better thinking at three a.m. on a treadmill in a place where the next call could come at any minute and probably will not.

I spend Friday nights at the station. We clean the ambulance. We take patients to the hospital. The work, on most nights, is gentle. An arm under an elbow, a name asked twice, a slow ride to the hospital because there is no need to hurry. I have come to love this part. The ordinariness of it. The way an older patient will apologize for the trouble they are causing while you are buckling them in.

Sometimes the calls are harder. There are nights when we come back to the station and clean the rig in a different kind of quiet. I remember one of those nights feeling something I did not expect, which was reinvigorated. Not happy. Not relieved. Something closer to awake. The work had asked something of us and we had given it, and the giving had returned something to us in a form I am still trying to name.

The crew is a second family. I love them all. I am not sure I have written that sentence before about anyone outside my house, and I am not sure how to follow it, so I will just leave it there.

The senior people on the squad have stories. I will not tell those stories here, because they are not mine to tell, and because the bay is the right place for them. But I have listened, and afterward I go home and the stories stay with me in a way that the ordinary calls do not. I did not witness them. I am carrying them anyway. I think this is part of what it means to be on a squad. The senior people hand you their worst calls, and you take them, because someday you will have your own, and someone younger will have to take those. It is a strange inheritance. You do not ask for it and you cannot refuse it, and the people giving it to you are not really giving it away. They still have it. It just lives in two places now instead of one.

I pray I never face what they have faced. I prepare myself to face it. I do not know how to hold both of those at once, so I hold them separately, on different nights, and hope that is enough.

Most of my other work happens at a desk. It is the kind of work where the people you are trying to help are aggregated into a demand vector, where decisions get made about them in rooms they are not in. I love that work and I am proud of it, and I think it might do some good. But it is a different posture from kneeling on a kitchen floor next to someone who has fallen, and I have started to feel the difference. The desk lets you think clearly. The ambulance does not let you think at all in the same way. You are inside something, and the thinking happens later, if it happens.

I do not want to make this into a clean lesson. The ambulance has not made me better at the desk, and the desk has not made me better in the ambulance. They are two different ways of working on behalf of people who are hurt, and I happen to do both, and I am not sure either one is teaching me how to do the other. What I can say is that the Friday nights have made me suspicious of any sentence I write about people I am trying to help that I could not also say out loud, in a stranger’s house, at two in the morning, to the person it is about. That is a high bar and I do not always clear it. But I notice now when I do not, and I did not used to.

I am leaving in July. I will not be at the station on Friday nights. I will keep the uniform. I will probably find a squad out there, eventually. But there is only one first squad, and these are the people who taught me what the inside of an ambulance smells like at the end of a quiet shift, and what it looks like when someone older than you carries something you have not yet had to carry. I am writing this down so I do not forget them.