WHAT ELSE COULD WE DO?

April 30, 2007

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. We didn’t know if they had a gun. We didn’t know what they wanted. We only knew it felt wrong. I remember the relief when they finally peeled off, and then the horror when dispatch said what they'd been doing to others. That last laugh in the cab—it wasn’t humor. It was survival.