We pulled out into traffic and he turned on our lights and siren. Somewhere in the bottom of my mind the thought flashed that his reaction should concern me, but I pushed it aside. He almost whooped with joy and jumped behind the wheel.

I’m kind of a control freak and prefer to drive to calls unless I’ve worked with a partner for a while, but I was tired and said, “Sure, let’s go.” He heard the call and asked, “Mind if I drive?” In fact, I didn’t know anything about him except his name. My new partner was an EMT that I had never worked with before. Right on cue the dispatcher came back with, “10-4, respond to a three car MVA, multiple injuries at….” I picked up the microphone and radioed, “Two-Eight’s in-service.” I yelled, “Where are you going? You don’t have a car here.” I saw him in the side mirror running away and heard a faint, “I don’t care.” I was sitting in the passenger seat trying to catch up on paperwork and enjoy a cigarette. Without a word to anyone he just started running. My partner was so happy he literally bounced out of the drivers seat just as his relief walked up. We could hear laughing in the background. The dispatcher broke the silence and said his relief would meet us at the hospital emergency room in a few minutes.

My partner snarled like a dog at the radio while thinking of something to say into the microphone. The dispatcher called his bluff and radioed that she was sending another ambulance and a fire engine to his house to make sure his poor pregnant pyromaniac grandmother was OK. He threatened that if he wasn’t relieved immediately, then whatever else happened at his house would be on the shift supervisor’s head. Luckily, it had put out the fire she started in the living room. My partner radioed dispatch and said he absolutely had to get off duty immediately to rush home because his grandmother, who suffers from pyromania, was having labor pains and had just called him to say that her water had broken. It took my wife a couple of years to get used to this. Emergency calls always trump swinging by the ambulance quarters to drop off someone at the end of their shift and pickup a fresh partner. I still had twelve hours to go on a twenty-four hour shift, but my partner was two hours past the end of his shift. We had just dropped our last patient off at the Emergency Room and knew there was more calls pending.

My partner and I had been running emergency calls back to back for the previous twelve hours.

(this is a true story / excerpt from my book)

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