Book Excerpt: ‘Trauma Sponges’

The book cover of "Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response."
The book will be released in October.

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Jeremy Norton’s upcoming memoir, “Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response.” With striking precision, the book vividly portrays the profound impact the job takes on EMS providers while also highlighting the distinct outlook that arises from enduring firsthand interactions with those in dire medical emergencies.

As a rookie, about a month after my first CPR—on a friend’s grandfather, as it turned out–we were cleaning up after a car fire when we caught a call for a baby not breathing. Those are calls everyone hauls ass for—racing to save a child. The family was Hmong and spoke no English. The distraught mom was holding the limp little girl, perhaps eighteen months old. A cop had arrived ahead of us and was trying to do mouth-to-mouth, frantically and awkwardly, while the mom clutched her daughter. The child’s lips were stained blue. We stepped in, taking the kid from mom and officer. His lips were also blue-stained, fainter than hers.

No one could give us any relevant information on her so we raced down the stairs and jumped into the ambulance as it arrived. I can’t remember whether we spoke or if I just grabbed the child from the mother and officer. It’s been twenty years. The medics had my backseat partner and me continue compressions and ventilations (not mouth-to-mouth . . .), while they tried to get the IV going and figure out what was going on. Healthy children don’t just die, certainly not from cardiac arrest. So, possibly, choking or some respiratory issue; or accidental poisoning. Perhaps whatever was tinting the lips blue was the root, but she was in a ceremonial outfit, and none of the pantomime and communications gave any indication that the family found her lip color disturbing or unexpected. Maybe an attempt at a cultural remedy for an illness. There were no signs of trauma. Her round face wasn’t distended or discolored. She was small, warm, and lifeless.

It was a tense, crowded space in the back of the ambulance. Little kids have such small veins that the medic had to use the intraosseo gun. The way he fumbled, it was clear he hadn’t used it much. And this was an infant. I’d never seen one deployed, but I was right there as he drilled the needle into her tiny shin bone. Once it was in, they had IV access and pumped a range of meds into her, without success. The cop popped his head in, now concerned he’d poisoned himself giving mouth-to-mouth. The language barrier with the family didn’t assuage his worries. The medics told him it didn’t look like poison, but he could follow up once we reached the ER—and in the future to use a mask.

We continued to work her down to the STAB room [critical unit at Emerg. Dept], with no change or improvement in her condition. The ER staff took over and, within seconds, we were dismissed. We stood idly on the periphery of the growing STAB team, peering over shoulders and around backs to see the tiny figure strapped onto the full-sized gurney. It was a horrendously absurd contrast. Then, not being lost, with things yet to do, we turned away and returned to our world.

The ride back to the station was somber. The utter absence of details and information was vexing. Before the captain could follow up with the ER staff, the red phone rang. He hung up and said, “Hey, kid, you know where Station Fifteen is?”

I nodded from where I was on my knees, restocking our med bags. “Well, get going. Fifteen’s lost one and you’re going there for the rest of the shift.”

And so began my first tramp. No warning, no preparation: one minute, we’d been washing hose and airing out our turnout gear, then we were flung into this tiny apartment where no one spoke English and I took a dead child out of her mother’s arms. We immersed ourselves utterly for thirty minutes, gaining no purchase against death. Then, abruptly, the ED kicked us clear and took over. Before I could restock our supplies and wrap my head around the details—blue lips, ceremonial outfit, freaked-out cop, nervous medic with a bone drill, the small round kid motionless and flaccid—I was sent out to cover at another station. I was a body for the department, detailed wherever the city was short.

Station 15 was largely a retirement station then, the crews on both Engine 15 and Truck 7 quite veteran and salty. It was very slow, a staid residential neighborhood; very unlike 5s. I sat amid the old men, ignored, and pondered the call. No one at this station knew or cared about the dead child. I had no one I could talk to, no one to share my feelings about the baby, the scene, the prickly details. I was alone with strangers. Then the shift ended and I drove home.

The kid didn’t make it, and we never learned more than that.

I add a coda, as several civilian readers have struggled with this vignette: What I am trying to share with you is not simply the sad call. A baby dying suddenly is a brutal tragedy. I am not wondering if we could have done more to save the child. We worked hard and well together. We did all we could. This is a vibrant (tragic) example of what this job puts us through: not simply the hard call, working the tiny dead child; not the details of distraught family and crowded ambulance and raw intimacy of fighting death for a human body; not the jarring contrast between what tragedies are occurring in an apartment or in the ambulance, then stepping out into daylight and everyday living.

I’m asking the reader to consider what it’s like: to carry the weight of that lost child and her family, with no resolution, no positive outcome, and to continue my work shift, then to find myself alone among a crew of jaded strangers who are more concerned that I kick in five bucks toward a dinner I don’t eat than learning anything about me. And I go home to my family in the morning, hold my young daughter close. What can I say? Some shifts, we see multiple deaths. Most every shift, we encounter suffering, grief, fear, pain, loss. How can I explain to anyone what this job does to us, when one single call is too disturbing for some readers to bear?

Excerpted from “The Heart Remains a Lonely Hunter” from Trauma Sponges: Dispatches from the Scarred Heart of Emergency Response by Jeremy Norton. Forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2023 by Jeremy Norton. Used by permission.

About the Author

Jeremy Norton was born and raised in Washington, DC, earned degrees in Literature and Creative Writing in the Boston area, taught school in Tennessee before moving to Minneapolis, MN in 1994. He worked odd jobs and taught writing at the Loft Literary Center while applying to Minneapolis Fire Department. He joined in 2000, promoted to Captain in 2007, Battalion Chief in 2015, then returned to the rigs as a Captain in 2017. He has been in charge of Engine 17 in South Minneapolis since 2017. His writing examines the complexities and connections of human behavior, especially the perspective offered through emergency medical response.

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