“A 49-year-old female was flying from New York to Los Angeles for a job interview. During the flight, she began to feel anxious and ill. She contacted a flight attendant (who happened to be a registered nurse) and told her, ''I think I'm going to pass out." The RN walked her to an area in the plane where she could lie down. A registered respiratory therapist on the flight joined them and offered his assistance.”

“Paramedics were called on a "sick case.'' They arrived at a low-income tenement and walked into a room thick with cigarette smoke and full of drunk people. The paramedics recognized one of the bystanders as a prostitute they had encountered on previous occasions. She directed the paramedics to the bathroom, where they found a 35-year-old male draped over the toilet.”

“As she was getting ready for bed, a 52-year-old woman noticed a familiar squeezing or tightness in the middle of her chest. She had experienced cardiac problems in the past and felt this was a resurgence of her angina, so she took a sublingual nitroglycerin tablet. It burned underneath her tongue, yet provided no relief for her chest discomfort. In the next half hour, she took two more sublingual nitroglycerin tablets. The pain, rather than abating, started to radiate toward her back, which concerned her enough to call for help.”

“Paramedics were called to the home of an 80-year-old female who reportedly had fallen down a flight of stairs. On arrival, they found her barely conscious, with a large hematoma on her left parietal scalp and with an apparently fractured left hip. She was at the bottom of 15 heavily carpeted stairs.”

“The fifty-first floor of a skyscraper may not seem very remote, but when ambulance crews encounter building access problems, elevators that stop at each floor, and no on-floor guidance to the patient, response times can rival those more normally associated with rural areas.”

“One afternoon in 1997, a gregarious American paramedic was practicing his Spanish language skills in a bar in Copån Ruinas, Honduras, when an urgent plea for help filtered through the door. "There's a kid hurt," recalled Rodger Harrison. "They thought I was a doctor. There was not a doctor in town who would treat the poor people, so I got involved."

“When emergencies are your everyday concern, perspective sometimes gets skewed. After a while, it's easy to imagine that every heartbeat is just waiting to wobble… Yet somehow, the hearts in your service area take the licking of daily life and keep on ticking. And when they don't, you get the call.”

“Within its relatively tiny toehold at the southern side of Mainland China, the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong displays an unbelievable hodge-podge of contrasts, presenting all the elements necessary to a superb EMS challenge.”

“One of the exciting, but sometimes frustrating aspects of prehospital care is that we cannot choose our "clientele." We have a responsibility to treat all callers with our best efforts, regardless of race, ethnic origin, nationality and religion. But healthcare workers have one additional parameter which can elicit prejudice and the temptation to treat a patient differently: size.”

“In 1983, former firefighter and paramedic Jeffrey Mitchell, PhD, introduced critical incident stress debriefing (CISD) to the emergency care world… [it] is one of the few things we, who give so much to others, can give ourselves.”

“Access to the medical system for the public inebriate often follows the usual pattern for anyone out in public in distress: call an ambulance… A prehospital team soon finds itself en route on a call which has been designated as "man down."

“There's a notion that needs dispelling, because it's disabling for some people, and primarily untrue. That is the idea that "we save lives." Its a seductive, thrilling concept, guaranteed to help raise our collective self-esteem (if only superficially)… It's time to deflate the myth. We have focused for too long on the idea that we save lives and have therefore developed inaccurate perceptions of EMS. It is time to recognize that what we actually do…”