'A Thousand Naked Strangers'

‘A Paramedic’s Wild Ride to the Edge and Back’ — a book excerpt by former EMT Kevin Hazzard. 

Grady is a strange place and very much a part of this city’s fabric. The EMS department is no different. Wearing a Grady uniform, driving a Grady ambulance, gets me into and (more important) out of countless dangerous situations. People walking down the street, all of them Rooters, many of them Grady Babies, stop and wave as we drive by. “Hey there, Grady” is yelled every day from every frayed corner of this city. But it’s not easy. The call volume is enormous — over 100,000 a year — and the patients (mostly homeless, many drunk) are a handful. Turnover’s so high that people who’ve been around a while won’t speak to me until I’ve made it six months. That’s the first threshold. If I haven’t been fired or quit or killed by then, I’ll probably make it. In the meantime, they ignore me.

Outside of work, on the street and among friends, it’s different. The minute I say I work for Grady, I have everyone’s attention. The place is so revered, so feared, so mythologized that saying I work here gets the same reaction every time: I bet you see some crazy (expletive).