And for the first time in what felt like months, I remembered what it felt like to just be a person.

Someone had told me earlier that week, “Don’t take it home—it’s just a job,” and it rattled around in my head like a loose coin. Just a job? Maybe for them.

I wrote this one in the aftermath of a call that marked me in a way I didn’t fully understand until much later.

I wrote this one when the burnout was starting to crack through the surface. I was six days deep into a brutal stretch of shifts—no sleep, fast food, too much caffeine, and a growing resentment I didn’t want to admit was there.

It struck me how much of this job is spent on the outside looking in. Not quite part of the world anymore, but tethered to it by a pager and a duty to show up when everything goes sideways.

That little peach-colored box of Narcan hit me harder than I expected. It wasn’t about trauma or blood or sirens—it was about what’s left behind.

I needed to write this post because too often, people forget that behind the Kevlar and the tough talk, there are human beings carrying impossible things. This one was for them.

That’s the thing they don’t tell you—sometimes the worst parts of the job don’t happen on scene, they show up later, when you're trying to sleep. The dreams come without warning, dragging pieces of memory you thought you'd buried.

I remember sitting there and watching the world go by and feeling that gut-punch sense that something wasn’t right—that people were slipping through the cracks, and not getting noticed.

I wrote this one because I needed to process the absurd, fragile line between life and death—how one minute, someone’s gone, and the next, they’re sitting up and cracking jokes like nothing happened.

But somewhere in the middle of all that motion, I realized I hadn’t actually felt anything in hours. I was running on autopilot, disconnected from the people, the sounds, even my own thoughts.

I wrote this one because I didn’t know what else to do with the weight of it

This post wasn’t about a patient—it was about me, and how easy it is in this job to lose the parts of yourself you used to be proud of.

I wrote What Else Could We Do? after one of the only calls in my career that actually scared me. Not the medical kind of scared—the human kind. It wasn’t a clinical emergency; it was two strangers in a red pickup, matching the description of an active shooter team, shadowing us, trying to ram us off the road.

I wrote Zero to Ohh Crap after a shift where I was drowning in monotony—chest pain, shortness of breath, rinse and repeat. I was frustrated, jaded, honestly feeling like a glorified taxi with a stethoscope.

I wrote Tears after one of the quietest, most emotionally jarring calls I’d run in months. It wasn’t trauma in the traditional sense—no gore, no chaos—but there was something haunting about that woman lying on her back, one side of her body betraying her while the other cried in silence.

It’s not what you thinI wrote Old and Cranky. And Rightfully So. after a shift that hit me in the gut—not because it was dramatic, but because it was real.

I wrote If You Don’t Want My Help, Why Did You Call? after a night where I was running on fumes—seven calls deep, dead tired, and facing yet another patient who treated us like the enemy.

She twitched, mumbled, and swatted at hallucinations—crack and trauma coursing through her veins.

I couldn’t stop replaying the moment in my head—how ordinary the day had been, how fast it flipped. One minute that guy was driving home, probably thinking about dinner, maybe talking to his wife on the phone. The next, he was gone. Just like that.