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Eight years ago I quit my job as a reporter at a mid-western newspaper, packed my meager belongings into my car and drove back to the East Coast. On that day, I closed what had been one of the best chapters in my working life and headed east into I didn’t know what.
A family situation dictated that I needed to be near where my mother lived on Long Island, canceling any chance of my getting another newspaper job. To keep body and soul together, I took the first job that I could get, shuffling equipment from place to place in a large hospital. I tried to put out of my mind the idea of ever having a writing job again.
Over the next few years, I worked a series of jobs that had in common only their remoteness from writing or reporting. For a couple of years I was an emergency medical technician on a transport ambulance, taking people from nursing homes to hospitals or to dialysis and then driving them back.
After my mother passed away, I moved first to New Jersey and then to Connecticut, where I worked on emergency ambulances. I had done that job back in the 1970s and had liked it. At 27 years old, getting up in the middle of the night to transport drunks rapidly through the city had seemed like fun. At age 57, it wasn’t nearly as much fun. In fact, it was 30 years less fun. I discovered that aging fat guys had no business carrying equally large people down multiple flights of stairs. And the occasional wrestling match with patients who, deep in their drug or alcohol addled brains had decided that punching out an EMT was the answer to their problems, left me sore and more than a little pissed off.
More than that, what I was seeing was disturbing to me in a way that it hadn’t been 30 years earlier. Back then, death and dying had been abstractions or at least if they were realities, they were other people’s realities. This go around, what I was seeing affected more deeply than I had anticipated it would.
One rainy night in New Jersey, my partner and I responded to a “person sick,” call. I always hated this type of call because it could mean anything from hangnail to a heart attack. This one turned out to be a middle aged woman who had overdosed on heroin. She and another person, who had called 911 and then taken off, had been shooting up in an abandoned apartment. We found her alone, in pitch blackness, propped against a piece of furniture. She had a pulse but had stopped breathing.
This produced a certain amount of frantic activity on our part. Paramedics came to our aid, and gave her an injection of a drug called Narcan that counters the effects of opiates such as heroin. She survived, at least until the next time.
On another night an overdose patient woke up after getting Narcan in the ambulance and immediately starting trying to bite me. He was angry because the medic had screwed up a perfectly good high and I was the first person he saw upon returning to consciousness. When his teeth failed to connect with my skin, he spat at me. Not for the last time I asked myself why the hell I was doing this job.
My first night on the job in a city in Connecticut, I was called to the scene of a major wreck on Interstate 95. The victim’s car had slammed at high speed into a guardrail and then cannoned across the highway, rolling over several times and ending up on its roof. When I arrived on the scene a team of EMTS, paramedics and fire fighters were trying to get her out of the car. She hadn’t been wearing her seat belt and was scrunched under the car’s steering wheel.
Being the new guy, I was relegated to fetching and carrying equipment and unloading the stretcher. At one point while they struggled to extricate her, I looked down and realized I was standing in a pool of motor oil mixed with blood from her injuries. That image stayed with me for days. The woman survived to walk out of the hospital with no apparent permanent injuries. She had no memory of the event. The word miracle doesn’t even apply.
The proverbial straw came at the end of a brutal shift in the city’s busiest ambulance station. In 12 hours my partner and I went on 18 calls. To be sure some of them were routine nonsense but we also responded to a motorcycle crash, a car rollover and numerous sick calls.
At the end of the shift, I was so exhausted that on the drive home I had to pull my car into a gas station parking area on the Merritt Parkway and take a nap. It was that or fall asleep at the wheel and run the car into a ditch. That day, I started looking for my next job.
I moved north to New Hampshire and signed up to write medical copy for a physician-related Web site; shades of my job as medical reporter in Illinois. Then, in another fit of idiocy, I connected with some people in the nascent biodiesel industry.
Now, it is axiomatic that any new opportunity for profit attracts both entrepreneurs and charlatans. With uncanny accuracy, my decisions attached me to the latter rather than the former.
In the space of a year, I worked for four brokers of waste vegetable, the raw material from which biodiesel was made. Essentially, my job was to find supplies of the stuff and arrange for its sale to firms that made biodiesel. It seemed a straight forward enough job. It wasn’t. With one notable exception, nearly everyone I had contact with on that job was if not actually crooked then he was more than a little bent.
At the end of that year, I was broke and despondent. I ended up slicing deli meats at the local Wal Mart. I despaired of ever again finding a writing job. The geniuses who run the newspaper industry had driven it to the edge of a cliff; the declining economy pushed it over.
I had tried writing for various Web sites but that paid so little – often enough it ended up paying nothing – it simply wasn’t worth the effort. At that point I realized that if I was ever to write again full-time I would have to create the opportunity for myself. So, I did. Hence this Web site.
