A Real Emergency Quotes

“I want to describe how impossible it seems to maintain hope underneath the never-ending crush of heartbreak and corruption and how somehow, my patients and co-workers manage to do it anyway. I hope that I have conveyed that our work can be boring, frustrating, and exhausting, but also punctuated with tremendous humanity and joy. I do not have a simple answer to the problems that plague the ambulance. I distrust any sentence that includes the phrase, “they just need to…” But I do think small improvements are possible. I like to imagine a future where paramedics are allowed to leave work at the end of their scheduled shifts, instead of being held over for hours with no advance notice. One where we receive regular feedback about our patient outcomes and participate in developing and improving our own protocols. I’d love to see the day when efficient patient hand-offs at emergency rooms are prioritized, so that hospitals aren’t allowed to pull ambulances off the street for half a day to compensate for their own staffing deficiencies.”
― Joanna Sokol, A Real Emergency: Stories from the Ambulance

“...a culture that denies death is a barrier to achieving a good death.”
― Joanna Sokol, A Real Emergency: Stories from the Ambulance