Trauma Sponges : Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response / Jeremy Norton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Norton, Jeremy, 1967- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Government, Resistance to.

Civil disobedience.

Norton, Jeremy, 1967-.

Norton, Jeremy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (352 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press, [2023]

Summary:

"In this remarkable memoir, Jeremy Norton marshals twenty-two years of professional experience to offer, with compassion and critique, an extraordinary portrayal of emergency responders. Trauma Sponges captures in arresting detail the personal and social toll the job exacts, as well as the unique perspective afforded by sustained direct encounters with the sick, the dying, and the dead"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Table of Contents

Front Matter(pp. i-viii)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.1

Table of Contents(pp. ix-x)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.2

TERMS AND ABBREVIATIONS(pp. xi-xii)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.3

INTRODUCTION This Is Not the Minneapolis Backdraft(pp. xiii-xxii)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.4

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO WRITING A MEMOIR ABOUT FIRE­fighter/EMTs, the street-level realities of health care, and the punishing cold weather of Minneapolis. A few things, actually.

And none of them was at all funny. But there you go, and here we are.

Twenty years into my career, twenty years of collecting experiences from work toward a book that addresses cultural issues in emergency response, the Covid-19 pandemic crashed our world. Soon after that, four Minneapolis police officers killed another Black man, slowly, in front of a crowd. My crew and I responded to that call-with no. . .

1 911 IS NOT, IN FACT, A JOKE(pp. 1-19)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.5

I'M A MINNEAPOLIS FIREFIGHTER/EMT. SINCE THE YEAR 2000, I HAVE GONE TO work for twenty-four-hour shifts, donned my lustrous blue poly cotton uniform, arranged my bulky firefighting gear beside the massive red fire truck, done my chores around the station, participated in perfunctory training or boundless chatter and gossip (mostly the latter), all while waiting for the alarm to dispatch my crew of three or four men and women to some type of emergency.

When the alarm comes in, we stop eating, put down our phones, drop whatever we're doing, jump up from the Murphy bed, pinch off a poop,. . .

2 YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS(pp. 20-36)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.6

I OFTEN FORGET THAT MOST PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT FIREFIGHTER/EMTS actually do. It is so ingrained and normalized for me that I gloss over the details of our job, or else I plop some horrific story on the dinner table when someone asks, "How was work?"

Filling the hours between our sporadic fire calls, the smoke alarms, the beeping CO detectors, the car wrecks, and all the ordinary mayhem of life and gravity, are a wide range of emergency medical calls. I wrote before that for nearly anything that is not an explicit police response (often we go on. . .

3 EXILE IN FIREVILLE(pp. 37-53)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.7

FIREFIGHTERS HAVE LOTS OF DOWNTIME. WE SIT AT THE STATION BETWEEN calls, waiting to be summoned to help someone. It is a culture shaped and perpetuated via oral tradition: we while away the hours rehashing past calls, romanticizing our awesomeness, giving horrible relationship advice, one-upping each other with Scary Fire Stories or Grue­some Medicals. We bitch and backbite as if that were the currency of our paychecks. There is a nice communal feeling, though, spinning old stories about kooky calls back in the day. Because of our shift work, we might share an incredible day or even a single, momentous. . .

4 THE LAYING OF HANDS(pp. 54-67)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.8

WHEN WE WERE ROOKIES, OUR EMT TEACHERS WERE BOTH GRIZZLED FROM twenty years as paramedics. Bill S. was a cross between midcareer Bill Murray and a less stoned, less Canadian Seth Rogen. He's the one who instilled in us that "if you don't have airway, you don't have shit." He also told us that he went ten years without a successful CPR, "and not because I'm a sucky medic, either. It isn't magic, not like they show on TV: 'Thump, thump-hooray! You saved him! What a hero!' " Twenty-plus years in, my success rate isn't much better.

Sandy Y. . . .

5 THE HEART REMAINS A LONELY HUNTER(pp. 68-81)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.9

THE FIRST TIME I RODE OUT-OF-RANK AS CAPTAIN FOR A SHIFT, WE RESPONDED to a call for shortness of breath. We marched through the house until we found our caller, a lady in the upstairs bedroom. She was propping her husband against the wall with her body, holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder. She said he'd been complaining of not feeling very well. The man looked at me, his eyes bulging with panic. He managed a few garbled words but was unable to respond to my questions coher­ently. Within seconds, he went limp, then unresponsive. I dragged. . .

6 THROWING ROCKS AT GOD(pp. 82-95)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.10

I HAVE WRITTEN SO FAR ABOUT THE HEAVY LOAD OF NON-EMERGENT MEDICAL issues and the dearth of fires. So it goes. This is the job, no matter how many packs of matches we scatter in the alleys . . . The stark reality is that we often operate within the shadow that death casts. We walk into a room and find horrible or banal deaths. I want to provide an understanding of what this work truly entails. Because, if I can help the readers recognize their own very human denial and avoidance of the inexorable facts of dying and death, I hope. . .

7 BOYS DON'T CRY(pp. 96-112)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.11

EARLIER, I SAID WE FIREFIGHTERS ARE JUDGMENT-FREE ANGELS OF COMPASsion and mercy, and-well, I didn't say that. Because we aren't.

We see people committing horrific crimes against their own humanity, mistreating themselves and, worse, their families. Particularly their kids. We help people up from the gutter knowing full well we're assisting them back to a cycle that ends in the gutter. We try not to make judgments about how people live. But we see it. We go into houses, rooms, apartments, cars, and we witness what is going on (or the consequences of what has been going on). We. . .

8 ANTE UP(pp. 113-129)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.12

I AM THE LAST MEMBER OF OUR FIRE DEPARTMENT TO DO MOUTH-TO-MOUTH on an adult patient. No pocket mask, no plastic barrier: straight-up lips to lips.

It was Christmas Eve 2001 and we were called out to "one unresponsive" in a car in a garage. We arrived in front of a house festooned, like many on the block, with flashing holiday lights. Our flashing emergency red-and-blues blended with theirs. At the end of a well-shoveled driveway was a man waving frantically from the attached garage. I beelined toward the wan yellow light and whirling mist of exhaust. The car was. . .

9 THANATOS IS A MOTHERFUCKER(pp. 130-143)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.13

ONE OF THE REALLY POSITIVE WAYS THAT EMERGENCY RESPONSE WORK has changed during my career is the approach to self-harming patients, which has improved by 1,000 percent, at least. When I started, with suicide attempts, the cops and EMS crews would often treat the distraught, despairing person as a pathetic whiner: It's nothing. She's being emotional. This guy's just looking for some attention. And the very sad, deeply hurting person would be brusquely hauled to the ambulance, taunted for bad nerve, bad aim, bad luck.

A slow but substantive recognition of the futility, if not abject cruelty, of treating a. . .

10 FATES AND FURIES(pp. 144-160)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.14

FOR TWO DECADES, I'VE FELT PEOPLE DEAD BENEATH MY FINGERS. I HAVE found them freshly dead and worked them to no avail, or I've found them decidedly dead and turned away. Twenty years responding to peo­ple dying slowly and horribly from terminal diseases, or rapidly and horribly from terminal injuries. I have been present for some peaceful, natural deaths-but those, while sublime and moving, are very rare for us. And the surviving families, the bereaved, they are still devastated. I see dead people and dying people as a matter of course. We will all join them, eventually. It is. . .

11 WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT COVID(pp.

161-193.

11 WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT COVID(pp. 161-193)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.15

WHAT FOLLOWS IS MY PERSONAL REFLECTION ON THE PANDEMIC. AS EMTS, my peers and I danced over the hot coals of uncertainty and perilous threat from the very outset. We lifted, carried, held the very sick and infectious, shouldering the duty of risk and care when nothing was yet known or certain. This has given me-forced on me-a sharp perspective to ponder and scrutinize the larger social catastrophe Covid-19 has caused. The truths about our country revealed by the pandemic reflect nearly every aspect and criticism of our sociology: health, wellness, class, race, gender, information and education, the. . .

12 KETAMINE OR KILL A MAN?(pp. 194-234)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.16

I WAS SITTING IN MY FIRE STATION IN SOUTH MINNEAPOLIS ONE MORNING in early January 2023 when I learned of the death of Keenan Anderson after an encounter with the Los Angeles Police Department. I was sitting in the same chair the night of May 25, 2020, when the Minneapolis Police used overwhelming physical force on a forgery suspect, a man who stated from the beginning of their interaction that he was anxious, claustrophobic, and hyperventilating. That man, George Floyd, died on the street six blocks from where I sat. He was not fighting the police: he was fighting to. . .

13 ARBITERS OF EXISTENCE(pp. 235-244)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.17

I AM PAID TO RESPOND TO ANYONE AND EVERYONE WHO DIALS 911. I'M HAPPY to do it. But the ceaseless non-emergency runs steal my sleep, my focus, my patience. Just as endless false fire alarms don't merely frustrate us-through the surging adrenaline and nervous energy that builds for the purpose of dealing with hazardous emergencies-but also train us to anticipate nothing rather than something, so too do nuisance EMS calls lull us into being complacent, jaded, and resentful. The hard calls, the real emergencies, demand something of us, and this makes me more protective of myself on nonsense. . .

14 THINNEST OF MARGINS(pp. 245-264)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.18

I HAVE BEEN ON SEVERAL OFFICER-INVOLVED FATALITIES OVER MY CAREER. While reflecting on them, I was struck by the white-boy realization that our lives hang in the balance by the thinnest of threads. Not "our" lives. Black lives. Largely, but not exclusively, Black men's lives. Police disproportionately kill Black men. The deadly, immoral consequence of aggressive policing: hundreds of unarmed and not actively threatening people of color are killed by police officers, and their killings are dismissed as The officer feared for his life and thus deadly force was justified. It is erroneous to say cops are racist. It would. . .

15 THE ASSASSINATION OF GEORGE FLOYD BY THE COWARD DEREK CHAUVIN(pp. 265-297)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.19

TRUE HORROR STORY: IF DEREK CHAUVIN HAD "MERELY" SHOT GEORGE Floyd, none of this would have happened. None of the subsequent upheaval, not the fumbling gestures at racial justice, no flailing attempts at change and inclusion. The four police officers involved likely would still be employed. Had Chauvin shot Mr. Floyd, it would have been over too fast for witnesses to record it. The usual process would have played out, providing the officers legal cover. The judicial system affords the police extreme discretion and defers to their "expert" perspective. Afraid for my life has been the standard defense in multiple. . .

16 A HASHTAG BRINGS NO ONE BACK(pp. 298-314)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.20

In the week following George Floyd's death and the ensuing upheaval, our crew responded to two different but significantly affecting calls, incidents that stung me at the time and haunted me afterward-even within the fraught context of the uprising, the riot damage, the tragedy of Mr. Floyd's killing. The calls involved young Black women who were both emotionally overwhelmed by the choking indecency of whiteruled America. Young women my daughters' ages who were suffering breakdowns as a result of fatigue and sorrow and anger. One was having a near-psychotic break. The other attempted self-harm. Both were out on the. . .

17 ORPHANS(pp. 315-327)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.21

I WAS ON SHIFT ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. THE FALLING TOWERS DID NOT REACH south Minneapolis, and I spent the day transfixed like much of the world, staring at the television. I was with two crews of guys who had never been to New York City, who had no idea the scope of what had happened. I worried about friends of mine in the city. It was a heavy, shocking day. I got off shift and went home, looking to hold Annie (whose birthday, September 12, had a definite pall cast over it) and snuggle baby Flann. As I got. . .

18 TRAUMA SPONGES: The Things We Carry(pp. 328-344)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.22

Even that is typical firefighter exaggeration. I almost caught one. As always, the mother and gravity had done all the work, delivering the child moments ahead of our arrival. So, I've yet to actually receive a living newborn's descent into this world. This kid was barely minutes old, and the scene was unexpected and wonderful.

What resonated afterward was how happy I felt, jubilant even, for much of the rest of the shift. It was a rare, truly happy call. The mom and dad were present and functional, the baby was healthy and wanted, there were no complications, the medics. . .

CONCLUSION Burnt Norton(pp. 345-354)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.23

The final trial of the officers charged in the killing of George Floyd approached. I reviewed my notes from May 25, 2020, preparing for the punishing, racking process of testifying. I watched-once again-the horrible footage, beginning to end, from each officer's body camera. It is brutal, so brutal. And I must watch it with ruthless clarity and focus. I could not leave it on Mute, as the timeline and the dialogue matter. I met with the prosecution team for trial prep, going over what to expect, what to focus on. My nights were jagged with stress dreams. My. . .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS(pp. 355-360)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.24

LUCK WON'T SAVE YOU BUT THESE BOOKS MIGHT: A Reading List(pp. 361-369)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.25

Back Matter(pp. 370-370)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2z862dq.26.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-4529-6975-2

1-4529-6974-4