As I read further into Shannon Burke’s novel, Black Flies, the realities of life as a paramedic are becoming more apparent. For the main character, Ollie Cross, the crazy world of hurt that he has to wade through is now less disturbing, more common place. Things that would have left him numb before have no evident effect on him. Cross also finds that his abilities as a paramedic are improving. On one occasion, Cross becomes extremely motivated to help a patient, a teenage boy. Cross is pound of how he handles the situation until he gets to the hospital and is told that he was wasting the ER doctors’ time. He explains, “The patient was off the board now and with his head turned to the side I could see he was missing the back half of his skull” (32). Cross realizes that he had been too excited to help the boy that he hadn’t seen that he was a lost cause. As time passes, Ollie sees that a paramedic needs an objective view, and that explained a lot to him about why the other paramedic’s handled themselves the way they did. Ollie comes to realize that there is a fine line as to how much one should care. At one point, a man Cross is treating and talking to has a heart attack and dies. Burke writes, “ I pretended it was an ordinary occurrence to have someone die in front of me” (39). Cross is making a progression to becoming a better paramedic. On the other hand, he has to be careful not to lose himself in the process.
Moving a little farther into the book, the psychological problems related to being a paramedic are discussed. At one point, Cross is called up to the station chief’s office. When he talks to Cross, the chief asks him a few questions, and after he is done he is told by a coworker that he was actually been psychologically assessed. Cross relates, “The chief had a doctorate in psychology. He wrote academic papers that he delivered at EMS conferences. The meeting was an examination” (44). The environment that Harlem medics found themselves in is detrimental to a person’s mental health, and Cross realized that this was true firsthand. Later, Cross describes some symptoms of this. He says, “Eagerness and thrill seeking in other’s misery is psychologically corrosive, and is also rampant in the EMS world” (44). This novel is fairly dark, but has a true sense of realism. This realism is what makes this book work.
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2 comments:
Lost cause... Huge overstatement. My dad and I were driving to our cabin once and we saw a deer that had been completely pasted onto the tar. "Being a highway partol would be an interesting job, peeling people off the pavement every night." I agree with that. The life of a paramedic would be too much for me to handle. Especially the dying part. Those who die... do it where I'm not around. I don't take death well. I'd never make it.
Paramedics need to desensitize themselves to death, since they are around it all the time. It will be interesting to see how Ollie Cross develops through the whole book. He may not totally lose his humanity, but he won't react the same.
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