{"id":48328,"date":"2025-09-01T18:25:01","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T22:25:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/?p=48328"},"modified":"2025-09-01T18:25:03","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T22:25:03","slug":"a-real-emergency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/2025\/09\/the-bookworm-sez\/a-real-emergency\/","title":{"rendered":"A Real Emergency!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s feast or famine; tear through a task, then don\u2019t have anything to do.  Isn\u2019t that always how it goes?  You spend hours stomping out metaphoric fires and just when you think you\u2019re done, another one flares up.  You run like crazy half the day with ten seconds to breath between crises, repeat as necessary.  You\u2019re either wrecked by mile-a-minute motion or, as in the new memoir \u201cA Real Emergency\u201d by Joanna Sokol, you deal with someone else\u2019s wreckage.  What was the worst thing you ever saw?  That\u2019s 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.  \u201cYes, I am fun at parties,\u201d she quips.  Her path to a career at the rear of an ambulance began with a \u201cbiology program at a competitive university\u201d 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 \u2013 but there was also boredom, nonsensical rules, and patients she got to know, enjoy, and others who left her with stories to tell.  \u201cIn the United States,\u201d she says, \u201cwe have this thing… this phone number you can call… to me, the most incredible thing is… say you need help, and there we are.\u201d  You know you want to know.  Even if you\u2019re squeamish, you know you want to read the stories author Joanna Sokol tells in \u201cA Real Emergency.\u201d  Fortunately for your shaky stomach, they\u2019re 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\u2019s 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\u2019ll ever need healthcare.  Find \u201cA Real Emergency\u201d and tear right through it!<\/p>

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It\u2019s feast or famine; tear through a task, then don\u2019t have anything to do.  Isn\u2019t that always how it goes?  You spend hours stomping out metaphoric fires and just when you think you\u2019re done, another one flares up.  You run like crazy half the day with ten seconds to breath between crises, repeat as necessary. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":48330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-48328","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-bookworm-sez"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48328"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48331,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48328\/revisions\/48331"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tenfourmagazine.com\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}