Talking Trauma

Late at night you find yourself at the Emergency Room of a large metropolitan hospital. To get away from the hacking coughs of the patients crowding the drab waiting room, you wander outside. By mistake, you exit the wrong door and find yourself in the ambulance loading zone. Clustered around the back of an ambulance, you notice a group of paramedics talking, smoking and laughing. “What,” you wonder, “could paramedics have to laugh about?” Nonchalantly you wander closer and hear snippets of their arresting conversation. One of the paramedics is telling a story and the other paramedics standing around occasionally comment on his oddly amusing tale. One story leads into another and soon you find yourself caught up in the storytelling world of paramedics. A perfect companion to Tangherlini’s book, Talking Trauma: Paramedics and Their Stories (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1998).