A Real Emergency
Release:
06/03/2025
Runtime:
11h 41m
Quantity:
Hilarious, horrifying, and poetic. In A Real Emergency, Joanna Sokol perfectly delivers the chaotic world of street medicine in all its tarnished glory. Sokol's account of fractured lives in San Francisco is both timely and riveting and is filled with moments of genuine grace.
Kevin Hazzard, author of A Thousand Naked Strangers and American Sirens
Introspective, richly layered, and surprisingly hopeful, A Real Emergency is a love letter from a paramedic to the best and worst parts of her career.
For fifteen years, Joanna Sokol filled private notebooks with her confusion, humor, and anger toward the strange world of emergency street medicine. As her career on the ambulance progressed, she found herself taking notes on scraps of paper, the backs of gloves, and in the margins of EKG printouts. She listened to her patients’ stories, left food out for their pets, and turned off the stove under their oxtail stews. Once, she read half a poem left in a dead woman’s typewriter. She learned about the history that brought ambulances into their current role as the caretakers of society’s forgotten and spoke to her colleagues about their own experiences and perspectives.
Those reflections are collected here, in a series of raw, powerful essays about the state modern healthcare.
Sokol’s life as a paramedic took her to three different counties: the casinos and trailer parks of the Nevada desert, the cozy beach town of Santa Cruz, and, eventually, the crowded tenements of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. There are no clear villains or heroes in Sokol’s world, only a group of patients and medics who are doing their best in a deeply broken system.
Combining impactful research, compassionate reflections on her most memorable patients, and the strong voices of her fellow paramedics, Sokol takes readers deep into the everyday reality of 911 first responders, offering insight, empathy, and a reminder of both the power and limitations of care.
For fifteen years, Joanna Sokol filled private notebooks with her confusion, humor, and anger toward the strange world of emergency street medicine. As her career on the ambulance progressed, she found herself taking notes on scraps of paper, the backs of gloves, and in the margins of EKG printouts. She listened to her patients’ stories, left food out for their pets, and turned off the stove under their oxtail stews. Once, she read half a poem left in a dead woman’s typewriter. She learned about the history that brought ambulances into their current role as the caretakers of society’s forgotten and spoke to her colleagues about their own experiences and perspectives.
Those reflections are collected here, in a series of raw, powerful essays about the state modern healthcare.
Sokol’s life as a paramedic took her to three different counties: the casinos and trailer parks of the Nevada desert, the cozy beach town of Santa Cruz, and, eventually, the crowded tenements of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. There are no clear villains or heroes in Sokol’s world, only a group of patients and medics who are doing their best in a deeply broken system.
Combining impactful research, compassionate reflections on her most memorable patients, and the strong voices of her fellow paramedics, Sokol takes readers deep into the everyday reality of 911 first responders, offering insight, empathy, and a reminder of both the power and limitations of care.
Release:
2025-06-03
Runtime:
11h 41m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780771006616
Praise