First responders are people who have been trained to arrive at the scene first in an emergency to provide basic medical treatment, such as ambulances, police, firefighters, etc. From this definition, we can see how important the first responder is to the person being rescued. Perhaps in the eyes of the rescued, the first responder is really an angel in the face of death! Jennifer Murphy is a volunteer first responder of the Brooklyn Park Slope Volunteer Ambulance Team, and the latest book "Life and Death Notes: The First First Responder's Self-Statement" published by the Chinese Translation Publishing House truly records all kinds of people and things she encountered in the rescue process, and her experience is happy, sad, touched, and sad.
Life is a very precious and fragile thing for human beings. You only have one life, and it's precious for everyone. The first responders who struggle and dedicate themselves between life and death are the most respected people in our society. When a car is involved in a car accident on the highway, when someone falls into a coma due to illness or accident, when the elderly are unconscious at home, the first responder is their lifeline. They are those who travel between life and death, and in the face of all kinds of dangers and uncertainties, they rush to the forefront without hesitation. Jennifer Murphy is one of them.
Jennifer Murphy holds a B.A. from Syracuse University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and an M.A. from New York University, and her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Mississippi Review, The Tree of Wrath, Forbes, and The New York Post. She is a volunteer first responder with the Brooklyn Park Slope Volunteer Ambulance Corps, volunteering to transport patients. In addition to her work as a first responder, she also works as an investigator and crisis counselor.
Funny, heartwarming, inspiring, and poignant, "A Tale of Life and Death: A First First Responder's Statement" is a true memoir that describes the incredible journey of life as the author, Jennifer Murphy, became the first responder. For Jennifer and her companions, it's more than just a job, it's a mission that will transport readers into a tense world of crisis, first aid, grief, uncertainty, and dark humor.
Through Jennifer Murphy's narration, we can learn about the pressures and challenges faced by first responders. In fact, many people working in the pre-hospital emergency field have experienced trauma and family crises themselves. When someone is on the verge of death or injury, first responders are always the first to arrive at the scene and are often threatened with infectious diseases, violence and even death. Their job is not simply to rescue the injured, but also to stabilize the situation in the first place and give the injured the best chance of survival. Their work is fraught with uncertainty, and sometimes even with all their efforts, not a single life can be saved. But even so, they stuck to their posts because they knew that they were the only hope for those in need.
As the first responder, Jennifer Murphy is often confronted with unexpected situations: "A few minutes later, a ragged homeless man wearing a drooping dirty neck brace stood in the middle of the street and met me. Then, he walked slowly towards the ambulance, and I knew that he wanted to talk to me. This happens quite often. When we were sitting in the ambulance, people kept coming up to us and asking us for something. Do you have aspirin? Yes, but only if you have a heart attack or heart attack. If it's just a headache, then we don't have aspirin. Do you have water? Yes, if it's summer and you have a heat stroke, our ambulance always has bottled water. But if you have just been shot, you shed a litre of blood, and you beg us to give you water, then we have no water. Because thirst is a bad sign that you are about to die. You think you need water, but what you need is a tourniquet, a blood transfusion, and a surgeon. As the homeless man got closer, I made sure the door was locked. Nina often makes fun of me because whenever people pass by our ambulance, if the doors are unlocked, I lock them immediately, even though they should never be locked. The locks on the ambulance make a loud clicking sound, so sometimes passers-by look at us angrily when they hear me suddenly lock the door. I locked the door because I thought of Adira Arroyo — a fire department first responder in the Bronx who was dragged out of her ambulance by a schizophrenic patient and dragged and run over to death by the ambulance. So whenever someone approaches the ambulance and asks us questions, that's all that comes to my mind as a first responder. If someone came up to me and talked to me, I would roll down the window an inch. If you want to talk to me or my partner, you can only say to this inch. With or without a pandemic, we are always vulnerable on the streets, and in a world of constant violence against first responders, injuries and tragedies are commonplace. ”
This book follows the extraordinary life of Jennifer Murphy as a first responder. Murphy is a moral, generous, charismatic, and sometimes clever girl who is studying to be a first responder when she crashes head-on with a tsunami of medical trauma in New York City. She embarks on a dizzying journey, and in the darkness of sacrifice, anger and madness, we also catch a glimpse of a touching light: a great love for others and selfless bravery. "'Where's my motorcycle?' The patient is still asking. People with concussions will repeat their words over and over again. Trying to get them to understand what's going on is as difficult as drinking soup with a fork. "I've never seen myself like this before, and I've never been surprised by such a rapid transformation: in just a few hours, from a bystander manipulated by fear, to a useful participant in an emergency, to someone who can do something and help others!" The lost faith came back to me and gave me a strength that I had never seen before. "After that 'massacre,' my world pretty much fell apart. I started smoking, drinking, skipping school. My grades dropped, and until then I had been an honor student, a good girl. Alcohol gave me courage and the motivation to speak out, which I desperately needed and I needed to use them against my father because I began to secretly fear that one day he would break down and take my life. We kept arguing. "He looked at me and said to me in the gentlest and kindest voice: 'Whenever you feel very much pain and your body can't handle it, you should panic. Your body is doing what it's supposed to do, and you need to go to the hospital. When I heard him say this, I couldn't help but cry and feel relieved. I fell in love with him right away. I love him because he believed in me, helped me, healed me, took me to the hospital, and stayed there for me. He is an angel, a stranger, but still an angel, a stranger angel. I want to be like him. I've never been so cared for by someone I don't know. "He said the worst thing I could see on the street was all kinds of car accidents and suicide by jumping off buildings." I've seen a guy who jumped off a bridge and didn't jump into the water. Some of the bones came out of the body. I've never seen anything like it before. That's my favorite pillow talk. "So, what do New York firefighters do every day? This is one of my favorite questions of my life. They're busy, but it's not just because they're fighting fires. In recent years, four out of every five emergencies firefighters respond to are medical emergencies; Only 1 out of every 40 calls is a fire, which is only 2.6% of their workload. ”
Jennifer Murphy offers us a window into the world of First Responders, documenting the grief and chaos they experienced. "'What's wrong with you?' I asked. 'It was a bad night,' he said, pointing to the trauma room full of nurses and doctors, 'I brought this man.' ''What happened?'' ''Someone jumped off the building, and it was still a young girl. She attempted suicide. 'Oh, my God. Did she succeed? ''I don't know, we did our best, we did CPR on her. Now they are rescuing her, but because she is headfirst on the ground, half of her face is gone. She lost half of her face, and it was a terrible night. ''It was horrible, and I'm sorry you had to witness that.'' Was this the first suicide jumper you dealt with? ''Me?'' No. I've seen people beheaded, dead children, and people cut in half on the subway. I've seen them all. ''Got it.'' Well, I still feel sorry for you. "'I've got to give you a heads-up,' I said, 'the last time we were on this shift, we sat for eight hours without getting an assignment. But just 5 minutes before the end of the shift, we received a mission where someone was injured. Luna kicked the dashboard. 'Don't crow's mouth! I can't believe you just said something like that! Looks like it's going to happen again! The first responders are superstitious. We work in the kingdom of life and death, in what the Irish call the 'Slim Land' (where the dividing line between reality and eternity disappears). If you say it's quiet tonight, you'll soon be overwhelmed by a whole bunch of tasks; If you say that the last time you drove down that street and a child was hit by a car, you will be dealing with a call from a child in the same neighborhood after 1 hour. So when 5 minutes before the end of the shift we received a mission where someone was injured, you can imagine Luna's anger at me. Ha ha. 'It's all your fault!' After we took a lady with a dislocated shoulder to the hospital, she yelled at me, 'You said this happened last time, and now we have it!' 'Dear Luna, I still bring it up to this day. After all these years, I can always hear about it, and I have to repent of constantly repenting for the task that led to it being received 5 minutes before the end of the shift. ”
A heart-wrenching, tale of love and battle, it's mundane and respectable, bold, honest, funny, cruel, irascible, and heartbreaking. This book is both a tribute to the first responders and an indictment of the world in which they live. Jennifer Murphy has been exposed to small but epic truths, and she wants to show us that the first responders on the front lines need help themselves. Murphy's writing is reminiscent of Mary Carr, Richard Price, Sarah Warwell and other great voices of our time, and she has her finger on the pulse of the moment, and this is one of the best works of medical street literature. After reading this book, we will know that this is not just a simple work memoir, but also teaches us to deal with life and face death with great courage. Life, death, love, this is a topic that we must learn to look at correctly throughout our lives, only when we have a correct view of life and death and the attitude of loving others, our life will be meaningful and valuable. As Jennifer Murphy writes in the preface, "From the moment you put on your uniform, people forget that you're just a human being." They will treat you as a hero, giving you superhuman qualities that you may or may not have: fearless, incompetent, and stoic." (Reader Daily all-media reporter He Jian)