Yup. I said that; “It’s a good thing I blew my back out or the job would have killed me.” My truck was running 5000 plus calls a year, I was working every overtime shift I could, my brain had stopped functioning properly and my outside life was in tatters. My inside life wasn’t much […]

“But the further away I get from that life the more I realize there is always somebody waiting to take our place. What I did mattered, but only for the time I was doing it. Now, somebody else has filled the shoes I once thought only I could wear.”   One hundred years from now […]

Life is short. When we are kids our days seem endless, and days and weeks crawl by. As we age, and count our time on earth in years, then decades, we begin to see just how quickly it all passes. In our youth, we are fascinated with possibilities; anything is possible, and the world is […]

It’s ugly, I have to close my eyes. It’s cool, yet beads of sweat form on my forehead. Nausea fills me. starting at my center, flows through my body and ends as a giant burst of pain in my head. I’m paralyzed, can barely breathe. Flashing lights appear, blind me, then go away. Somebody is […]

We had bunks, and if we were lucky used them between the hours of 2300 and 0600. They were there for an unsanctioned rest as well, and I used mine every chance I could after a typical night on Rescue 1. Six after was not unusual, four the norm and every now and then just […]

EMS Week . . . There is something sacred inside the cab of the world’s ambulances; that small space that we inhabit after the smoke has cleared, the battles for life won or lost, babies delivered, lives changed forever and things we will never experience in the outside world. The ambulance cab holds more secrets […]

This started as a Facebook post last week, I expanded it and it’s in the Providence Journal today. She was the coolest girl I knew. She grew up in the projects, raised a son, knew everybody, scared me a little and made me laugh. We worked on different trucks but the same shift, for the […]

By Michael Morse A friend died unexpectedly at home. He was a year younger than me. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and that was okay with both of us. We have a lot of people we call friends; people we meet along our journey, people who are friends for a while, friends of […]

My cousin Caroline, a teacher at the Broad Street School, right in the heart of my first-in district, asked me if I could visit her kindergarten class with the fire truck. She thought her students would love it. I agreed, and we set a date and time. I explained that I had transferred from Engine […]

I miss getting to work an hour early, picking up the paper from the ramp, the apparatus floor ghostly quiet, entering the boot room, smoke mixed with sweat and leather, gear lined up, squared away, waiting for bodies to fill it. I miss signing the accountability sheet, seeing who was already there, climbing the stairs […]