Joanna Sokol's 'A Real Emergency - Stories from the Ambulance' is More than a Memoir

Former EMT and paramedic, Joanna Sokol, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss her powerful new memoir, A Real Emergency: Stories from the Ambulance. During the decade she spent working in the ambulance, Sokol often kept a small journal in her back pocket and wrote down patient notes as well as anecdotes about her day-to-day experiences with them. Those notes were then transferred to her book in which she describes her time working as a 911 first responder. Additionally, she includes passages from paramedics she formerly worked with and also delves into the history of the ambulance system. As for why she chose to go into this profession, she remarked, “I loved the immediacy of it… I loved the idea that you’re out there in the world helping people with your hands, you’re using your body, you’re not sitting behind a screen, you’re actually, like, out in streets and hotels and houses and talking to people and using your hands to help them out. It really appealed to me.” While she enjoyed certain aspects of the job, she did find working in an ambulance to be physically demanding and without a station to rest at in between calls, the work was often difficult. “You’re carrying people up and down stairs… a lot of the buildings either don’t have elevators or the elevators are broken or they’re too small to fit a gurney… you’re physically carrying them down four flights of stairs and then after that call, you don’t get to go rest in a station and stretch your legs out, you just stuff yourself in the front cab of a van and drive to the next call, and so injuries are really, really common. You have a ton of injuries, and unfortunately, it’s more about the work conditions than it is about the patients themselves.”

Regarding the structure of her book, Sokol decided not to make it a straightforward, chronological memoir because of the erratic nature of being a paramedic. “That’s not really how the job feels when you’re doing it. My memories of the job are really choppy. I don’t remember my whole day… the order of what things happen in is really confusing… I wanted medics to be able to read the book and so I really liked the idea of just different stories popping up and you read a bunch of different little stories and then over time it gives you a more complete narrative arc… it is roughly chronological… we do, sort of, follow my career from the beginning to the end, and my growth as a person and a medic.”

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