It’s feast or famine; tear through a task, then don’t have anything to do. Isn’t that always how it goes? You spend hours stomping out metaphoric fires and just when you think you’re done, another one flares up. You run like crazy half the day with ten seconds to breath between crises, repeat as necessary. You’re either wrecked by mile-a-minute motion or, as in the new memoir “A Real Emergency” by Joanna Sokol, you deal with someone else’s wreckage. What was the worst thing you ever saw? That’s perhaps the most frequent question Joanna Sokol gets when people learn that she was a paramedic for fifteen years. She obliges with appropriately ugly tales of heart attacks and car wrecks, sick kids and homeless folks. “Yes, I am fun at parties,” she quips. Her path to a career at the rear of an ambulance began with a “biology program at a competitive university” but the coursework was harder than Sokol expected. Unhappy about being stuck indoors, she cut classes to go snowboarding and hiking before dropping out of school to work a series of random jobs that introduced her to rescue personnel and firefighters. Their tales influenced her to take Emergency Medical Technician classes. She soon realized that being an EMT was fun, but paramedics were paid better. Four years later, Sokol was finally accepted for a two-year paramedic program, she got licensed and found a job in Reno and then San Francisco. Her job was to save lives and offer comfort, which is often what people really want – but there was also boredom, nonsensical rules, and patients she got to know, enjoy, and others who left her with stories to tell. “In the United States,” she says, “we have this thing… this phone number you can call… to me, the most incredible thing is… say you need help, and there we are.” You know you want to know. Even if you’re squeamish, you know you want to read the stories author Joanna Sokol tells in “A Real Emergency.” Fortunately for your shaky stomach, they’re not all blood-and-guts. Instead, Sokol is balanced and thoughtful in this memoir, writing about her coworkers and the job just as much as about the patients. There’s gruesomeness, but in proper doses and not gratuitously. Readers get a good sense of what EMTs and paramedics do, and with that comes outrage at how budgets and corporate ownership affects the work they do and the care we get. Sokol offers relief from this with stories of her own downtime, funny moments, tales of the miraculous, along with words from other paramedics. This book is excellent for true medicine fans, grateful former patients, the curious, and anyone who’ll ever need healthcare. Find “A Real Emergency” and tear right through it!