Kevin Hazzard - A Thousand Naked Strangers: A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back

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Praise for

A THOUSAND NAKED STRANGERS

This insiders tale of what really happens in the back of an emergency ambulance is as absorbing as it is revealing. Gifted with a reporters eye for detail and the wit and style of a bemused raconteur, Hazzard shows us what might happen if the medicos from M*A*S*H were miraculously deposited on the set of Homicide: Life on the Street .

Bob Drury, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Heart of Everything That Is and Last Men Out

An unstoppable adrenaline rush with lyrical moments of truth and beauty. Hazzards unforgettable portraits of people in extremis, and the swaggering, sardonic, and ultimately courageous medics who take care of them, will stay with you long after youve turned the last page of this hell-for-leather ride-along.

Theresa Brown, author of Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between

Take a terrific writer and put him in tragic, frantic, emotional, heartbreaking and freaking situations for yearsyou get A Thousand Naked Strangers . Reading this book is like watching The Matrix . Hazzard slows down the chaos and danger to allow himself (and the reader) to experience it. A paramedics life is the closest thing to combat in the civilian world. To paraphrase a line in The Bridge at Toki Ri , Where do we get these guys? This book is one long rush.

Phillip Jennings, author of Nam-a-Rama and Goodbye Mexico

Get ready to feel the gunslinging, godlike power of running calls in the back of an ambulance. Here, youll learn what medics already know: along with the vibrators, maggots, crackheads, homeless shelters, and booby traps, its the madness that both wrings you out and is the jobs biggest turn-on.

Julie Holland, MD, author of Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER

Open Kevin Hazzards excellent book and you might die laughing. You might also die of a broken heart. Or shock. Whatever, this writer will jolt you back to life with his sensational inside account of the world of emergency medical personnel. A Thousand Naked Strangers sends out a 911 call to readers... and those lucky enough to know these pages will never hear an ambulance siren the same way again.

Charles McNair, author of Land OGoshen and Picketts Charge

A Thousand Naked Strangers is a voyeuristic ride-along with a seasoned paramedic. Kevin Hazzard has an eye for Atlantas gritty detailits true character and its true characters. Buckle up and prepare for an eye-opening plunge into barely controlled chaos.

Judy Melinek, MD, coauthor (with T.J. Mitchell) of the New York Times bestseller Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner

A no-holds-barred look at what its really like in the trenches. A paramedics story of life and death and personal growth told from the back of an ambulance. Well worth the ride.

Robert D. Lesslie, MD, author of Miracles in the ER: Extraordinary Stories from a Doctors Journal

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Copyright 2016 by Kevin Hazzard

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First Scribner hardcover edition January 2016

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Interior design by Akasha Archer

Jacket design by Pete Garceau

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-1083-2

ISBN 978-1-5011-1087-0 (ebook)

Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

Youll see some terrible stuff, I guess. Thats how it goes. But try to look for the good things, too. Theyll be there if you look.

T IM OB RIEN

The Menace is loose again... running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches.

H UNTER S. T HOMPSON

Au revoir, gophr.

C ARL S PACKLER , C ADDYSHACK

I did nothing to save the first person who died in front of me. I simply stood watch and let her go. She was old and white and wasting away in a nursing home. Her death was unceremonious, but fast, and I was the only witness, earths final sentry, there to do nothing but close the gates as she slipped through.

I was only twenty-six when she died, but already Id squandered away two livesthe first as a failed salesman, the other as a reporter in exile. EMS was an accidental third act. It was early 2004, centuries ago. When I look back, I find it hard to believe this death and countless others happened, that at one time my sole purpose was to be present, as either anxious participant or indifferent witness. As with much of my EMS life, the memory is fuzzy: soft light filtered through gauze. Its only the detailsthe little ones that dont seem to matter at the timethat carry on. So really, what I have is more sensation than recollection, more feeling than anecdote.

This is how it all feels to me now.

Its my second night, and Im partnered with a guy who never goes home. Hes a firefighter in the next county, but hell do anything for money and works a handful of part-time jobs. When he isnt here or at the fire station, he sweats over the fryer at McDonalds. Just before ten, were called to a nursing home for a sick woman. My partner is tired. He walks slowly, eyes to the floor, as we push the stretcher off the elevator and wander down the long corridor to the patients room. We ease alongside her bed. A nurse hovers in the background, saying the woman didnt eat dinner, isnt acting like herself, and needs to be seen. I take her blood pressure, her pulse, count her breaths. Her eyes are closed; her skinwhite and crinkled like parchment paperis dry and hot. My partner asks for her papers. We dont ever leave a nursing home without papers. Most people in a nursing home cant talk, and those who can dont make sense, so even a question as straightforward as Who are you? doesnt yield usable results. So we get the papers, a thick manila envelope stuffed with everything from medical problems to next of kin. More important, its in this packet that well find insurance information and whether or not theres a do-not-resuscitate order.

Ostensibly, were here for the patient, but really all we care about is the DNR.