BAPTISM.

July 10, 2007

I wrote this one in the aftermath of a call that marked me in a way I didn’t fully understand until much later. It was one of my first real wake-up calls—the kind that strips away any romantic ideas you had about the job. Nothing prepares you for the helplessness of watching someone die right in front of you, especially when you're the one who's supposed to stop it. I remember going home after that shift and feeling like I had crossed some invisible threshold. I wasn’t the same. Something had changed—not in a dramatic, cinematic way, but in a quiet, unsettling one. That’s why I wrote Baptism. Because that night wasn’t just another call—it was an initiation. A grim, unspoken rite of passage into the reality of what this work really demands.