A Real Emergency: Stories from the Ambulance

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 ...