Book Review: Gutter Medicine: Twenty-six Years as a Firefighter Paramedic by Roger C. Huder
Why did I read this book?
When you are working as a First Responder it is inevitable that people you meet ask for you to describe what it is like. After all my years in the field, I gave up on trying to convey what the street is like. I thought that maybe, somebody out there had found a way to write about it in a way that is getting close to what it really is like. While browsing books on Goodreads, I found this one.
What is the book about?
The book tries to give the reader a feeling of what it is like to be working as a First Responder. Roger Huder describes not only his days as a Paramedic/Firefighter but also explains how working in the field impacts our personal lives. He goes as far as to describe how the job changed him as a person, how you see the world differently once you have seen the “real” life out there.
Impressions.
I did like the book. My biggest issue was that I never focussed on the people that we could not save. Instead, I think that even saving only one life will make it all worthwhile. Saving that one life means having an impact on all the people close to him/her. And all the people that will cross the person’s path in the future. To me focussing on the ones we cannot save is not healthy.
It was fun and entertaining to read another point of view when it comes to EMS/Firefighting.
Who is this book for?
Anybody remotely interested in the field of EMS/Firefighting will enjoy reading this book. It can be brutally descriptive in some of the scenes, stay away if you don’t like to get the “details”. I think that this book might be for you if you want to get as close as possible to understand how the job changes a person. It obviously has a different impact on all of us, but the way it changes how we see the world is quite similar for all of us.
Memorable Quote
“Stories from the street are not funny. People would ask me to tell them a funny story from work. When I tried, nobody would laugh but me. The stories that are funny to us are not funny to civilians.”
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