EMS - Emergency Medical Services

I was so proud the day I joined the paramedic corps at St. Mary's General Hospital. My childhood dream was to be a doctor, but I didn’t have the money so I became a paramedic instead, you know, to “help save lives”. I remember my first dispatch; we were rolling around in the sardine can when we got the call and got sent to a half-way home somewhere in the Bronx in response to a stabbing. From beginning to end, I never understood a single word the boy gargled to me before he died. And I thought that’d be the worst of it until someone else died, and then another, and another, until I finally graduated from futile attempts at resuscitation to scraping dead people off the tarmac. Why am I here, why would anyone want to make $5 more than minimum wage and watch people die for a living?