Heroes and Lies: Storytelling Tactics among Paramedics

Abstract

Among paramedics, part of the working day consists of telling stories about emergency responses--rehashing the events that are the raison d'etre of their profession. In the downtime between calls, the medics attempt to fit the day's events into their broader conception of their work. Among the medics in my fieldwork area, I have found a deeply cynical and self-deprecatory storytelling tradition--one that countermands the media representations of their field so neatly presented in globally popular television programmes such as Rescue 911. Rather than play into media presentations of them as silent heroes "just doin' our job," paramedics tend to present themselves in their stories as anti-heroes, always ready with a sardonic quip in even the most horrific situations. This storytelling is part of the medics' tactical resistance to the various groups with whom they come into contact on a daily basis, including managers, field supervisors, hospital personnel, firefighters, police officers, bystanders, their patients and each other. In the course of their storytelling, medics often resort to strong language. For the sake of authenticity, this has been retained in the transcripts in this article.

Late one night you find yourself at the Emergency Room of a large metropolitan hospital. To get away from the crowded 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 three paramedics talking and laughing. "What," you wonder, "could paramedics have to laugh about?" Nonchalantly, you wander closer. One of the paramedics is telling a story and the others standing around occasionally comment on his dark tale:

   Medic 1: I did ACLS (Advanced Cardiac Life Support) on Lake Chabot, that
   was pretty cool. We got a call out to Lake Chabot for a person who'd
   committed suicide by putting on about four or five wool jackets and walking
   into the lake with his arms over his head and just dropping them into the
   water. So we get out there, and we had to wait an hour for the dive team to
   show up. [laughter] We weren't expecting too much. [laughter] Dive team
   finally showed up. And the genius firefighter said they'd found the body
   with a fish finder. Supposedly it was about twenty, twenty-five feet off
   shore. Well the diver shows up and starts his little routine and about five
   feet offshore he finds the body! So this whole time this guy was within
   literally arm's reach of us, just sitting on the shore, smoking cigarettes,
   shooting the shit. [laughter]

   Medic 2: Oh shit!

   Medic 1: They pull him out and this guy just looked like death warmed over.
   It was just ridiculous. So we're stripping him down, getting all his wet
   clothes off, and he has a little bump under his chest. Put a monitor on
   him, dude's got a pacemaker! [laughter]

   Medic 3: Oh man!

   Medic 1: Beans! So now we have to work this guy. We intubate him, we start
   working this guy. Now there was about a two or three hundred-yard hike with
   a stretcher up to the ambulance and we couldn't do CPR [Cardiac-Pulmonary
   Resuscitation] that whole time ... When we finally got to the ambulance,
   [we] already had a channel for base hospital so we got a whole mess of
   drugs for him. It didn't work! [laughter] Got the guy to the hospital and
   the doctor said, "Nice knowing ya!" That was it.

   Medic 2: That's a cool call. I had something kinda like that. We were ...

Just as the second medic is about to join the storytelling, a beeper sounds and the atmosphere quickly changes. One of the medics climbs into an ambulance while the other two wander back inside the hospital. As the ambulance pulls away, you are left in the parking lot of the hospital wondering about the conversation--was it an aberration or a view into a hidden dimension of work among ambulance personnel? At the very least, the conversation did not tally with representations of the field that appear on television.

Introduction

"Reality television" programmes that purport to tell the "true" stories of police and rescue personnel, and closely related dramatic series such as E.R., have gained extraordinary popularity in recent years. [1] Indeed, programmes such as Rescue 911, Cops, Code Three, and Real Stories of the Highway Patrol almost guarantee that an evening spent in front of an American television will provide a glimpse into the chaotic underworld of the modern city where violence, murder, prostitution and drug dealing are everyday fare. [2] Since these programmes emphasise the heroic aspects of the work--chasing criminals or saving lives--they provide little opportunity for the emergency personnel to tell their stories in their own words. On Rescue 911, for example, the producers cast paramedics as B-actors in a second-rate docu-drama recreating memorable rescues, rather than allowing them to tell their stories as they would to each other. During the few moments when the paramedics do speak on Rescue 911, it is always within the confines of a closely scripted interview or an elaborately edited "sound bite." Although the situations documented on these programmes are also frequently the subjects of paramedics' personal experience narratives, on television visual presentation takes precedence over narrative description and the paramedics' personal perspectives are consequently downplayed. Accordingly, and somewhat ironically, reality television programmes fail to deliver what people tune in for in the first place, namely, a first-hand experience of everyday life on the front-line of the emergency professions. On television, the well-developed personal experience narratives that form a significant part of the working day are regrettably lost amid the glare of the lights and machinations of the camera crew. This lost folkloric dimension of the work, however, is one that holds significant importance for the workers and, in turn, for our understanding of occupational life.