Into the Breach: A Year of Life and Death with EMS

[x635 4,066]

Book Title: Into the Breach: A Year of Life and Death with EMS

Author: J.A. Karam

Publisher: St. Martins Press

Publication Date: November 2002

ISBN: 0312306172

Official Website:

Purchase Link: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearc...312306175&itm=1

Synopsis/Reviews:

Kirkus Reviews

A disturbing descent into the maelstrom of city life with a New Jersey EMS team. "Coming upon decapitations, hemicorporectomies (bodies torn in half), suicides, child abuse, miscarriages, and other troubling scenes is stressful," remarks journalist Karam with stunning understatement. For more than two years, she worked with an emergency medical service unit operating out of University Hospital in Newark, a municipality particularly rich in urban malfunctions thanks to its extreme poverty and severely overused road system. Karam shadowed several teams in a unit divided among BLS (basic life support), ALS (advanced life support), Rescue, and Dispatch. Her method is to accumulate anecdotes, which over time add up to character profiles of her EMS team members. It’s character, as much as equipment and skill, that keeps this service going. Here’s a typical start for BLS partners Benny Cardona and Vince Callahan: their evening "warms up with a feverish, sexually active woman with AIDS and severe stomach cramps; a psychotic middle-aged man who tried to ‘stick up’ the Cozy Corner bar with a ‘stick’; and a middle-aged diabetic man vomiting blood." Excretions of all kinds are par for the course. "Blue-shirts" inch into incredibly squalid living quarters, moderate the continual drama of sex, violence, and intoxication (by alcohol, heroin, bug spray, etc.), and try to remember why they are doing this. It isn’t unusual for a BLS unit to haul a 300-pound emergency case down four or five flights of rickety stairs, while trying to keep control of 60 pounds of equipment. Towards the end, the anecdotes prove too much of a good thing, crushing Karam’s more general portrait of how the medical and securityinfrastructure functions in a large city. Medical melodrama will always be a TV staple, but this searing tour of duty suggests that an EMS docudrama would never work: few could bear so much reality.

From the Publisher

Into the Breach is the true story of paramedics, emergency medical technicians, and heavy-rescue specialists fighting to control trauma and medical emergencies in one of America's toughest and most violent cities: Newark, New Jersey. A riveting account that hauls readers on a first-hand tour of street medicine today, Into the Breach shows what really happens inside an ambulance and some of the diverse and bizarre places EMS workers tread.

Through authentic accounts, every facet of emergency care is on display-from the first 911 call to patient discharge or death, including an exclusive look at what is perhaps the biggest decontamination operation ever conducted, which crews performed for victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.

A hybrid profession that blends public safety and public health, EMS attracts careerists and volunteers from all sectors of society-from Boy Scouts and housewives to Fortune 500 vice presidents and work-fare recipients. The men and women that make up the Newark EMS graveyard shift, one of the busiest, full-time teams in the nation, are quintessential EMS workers: intense, irreverent, hard-working action junkies who crave autonomy and the instant gratification of solving critical problems in real time. This unflinching profile hones in on award-winning EMS workers as well as those who pollute the industry, ironically, sometimes one and the same.

Into the Breach offers an unusual opportunity to bear witness to unimaginable suffering, heroic stoicism, and the inventiveness of American EMS workers fighting to save lives

Your Review And Comments: Excellent and comprehensive look inside of one of the nations best EMS systems right here in the tri-state area!

Other: