Life During Wartime 1
" ... But in the last year I had started to lose that control. I'd always had nightmares , but now the ghosts didn't wait for me to sleep. My wife left. I drank everyday. Help others and you help yourself, that was my motto. But i hadn't saved anyone in months...
My parents fought often and ferociously , and it was not uncommon for my mother to leave my room after her sweet declarations and begin a blindsided verbal lashing of my father so intense you would think she had just found him dancing naked on the coffee table with the widow from next door... I would never be like my father, never curse my life with regret. I wanted to go back to the city, fight it out where he had given up. I was nineteen when i decide to become a medic, drive an ambulance.Perfect. Save lives and see the front lines.
... last spring , for example , I'd had a March of tragedy, of blinding smells and deafening stains. Mona and I had begun to fight seriously. Then one night I was called to the Dynamite Club for an eighteen -year - old girl with asthma. She'd come with her friends from long island , and after dancing two hours she smoked a cigarette and stopped breathing... I grabbed a tube and laryngoscope blade from the the airway bag and sprinted towards her.. two minutes later her eyes opened , her cheeks flushed , she reached up and grabbed my nose. For weeks after, I couldn't feel the earth. Everything I touched became light. Horns played in my shoes, flowers fell from my pockets. I was still doing the same calls , but now the dead kept to themselves, the dying kept hope, and the dispatcher gave the worst calls to someone else. Mona and I stopped fighting and were married again,this time in a bar on Second Avenue . Two cops put Mr. O on a train to Virginia. It took him more than a month to get back. Saving someones life is like falling in love, the best drug in the world. For days , sometimes weeks , afterward , you walk the streets making infinte whatever you see. Time slows and stretches foward and you wonder if you've become immortal, as if you saved your own life as well. What was once so criminally happenstantial suddenly makes sense , a reason and order to every detail. God has just passed through - why deny it , that for a moment there , God was you... Taking credt when everything's gone right doesn't work in reverse when things go wrong... spreading the blame is an essential medic survival tool as well as a valuable asset in any post medic career. The god of hell-fire is not a role most of us wish to play...
Two years later she was begging me to quit, but when we met she said i had the most important job in the city. I was a lifesaver , the reapers reaper. Walking with Mona in the light of those first months together , I thought i had shaken off the boy's shadow like a bad cold... I was damaged goods. Just quit , she kept saying before she left , and we'll find some way to start again. I had quit a hundred times since, and still I kept coming back , as if I was too weak and too heavy to climb free, the job holding me like gravity. .."
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Joe Connelly after nine years of service.
My parents fought often and ferociously , and it was not uncommon for my mother to leave my room after her sweet declarations and begin a blindsided verbal lashing of my father so intense you would think she had just found him dancing naked on the coffee table with the widow from next door... I would never be like my father, never curse my life with regret. I wanted to go back to the city, fight it out where he had given up. I was nineteen when i decide to become a medic, drive an ambulance.Perfect. Save lives and see the front lines.
... last spring , for example , I'd had a March of tragedy, of blinding smells and deafening stains. Mona and I had begun to fight seriously. Then one night I was called to the Dynamite Club for an eighteen -year - old girl with asthma. She'd come with her friends from long island , and after dancing two hours she smoked a cigarette and stopped breathing... I grabbed a tube and laryngoscope blade from the the airway bag and sprinted towards her.. two minutes later her eyes opened , her cheeks flushed , she reached up and grabbed my nose. For weeks after, I couldn't feel the earth. Everything I touched became light. Horns played in my shoes, flowers fell from my pockets. I was still doing the same calls , but now the dead kept to themselves, the dying kept hope, and the dispatcher gave the worst calls to someone else. Mona and I stopped fighting and were married again,this time in a bar on Second Avenue . Two cops put Mr. O on a train to Virginia. It took him more than a month to get back. Saving someones life is like falling in love, the best drug in the world. For days , sometimes weeks , afterward , you walk the streets making infinte whatever you see. Time slows and stretches foward and you wonder if you've become immortal, as if you saved your own life as well. What was once so criminally happenstantial suddenly makes sense , a reason and order to every detail. God has just passed through - why deny it , that for a moment there , God was you... Taking credt when everything's gone right doesn't work in reverse when things go wrong... spreading the blame is an essential medic survival tool as well as a valuable asset in any post medic career. The god of hell-fire is not a role most of us wish to play...
Two years later she was begging me to quit, but when we met she said i had the most important job in the city. I was a lifesaver , the reapers reaper. Walking with Mona in the light of those first months together , I thought i had shaken off the boy's shadow like a bad cold... I was damaged goods. Just quit , she kept saying before she left , and we'll find some way to start again. I had quit a hundred times since, and still I kept coming back , as if I was too weak and too heavy to climb free, the job holding me like gravity. .."
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Joe Connelly after nine years of service.