These NYC Ambulance Volunteers Have Seen it All!
These NYC Ambulance Volunteers Have Seen it All!
Plus! An AI-Generated Atrium!! Items of Interest!!!
Hello everyone,
Welcome to Issue #99 of CAFÉ ANNE!
You all seemed to love Sam Silverman’s AI-generated bagels in last week’s issue. I also got a lot of responses to the story about the weird public atrium at 60 Wall Street, and what site’s regulars would like to see in a new design.
So of course I could not resist combining the two themes. This morning, I asked an AI to design “a new public atrium at 60 Wall Street that includes a stage, a microwave oven, a giant television and is welcoming to homeless people.”
Here’s what I got:
Okay, some questions: why is there a hellish inferno raging inside the microwave? Why is the stage on fire? Why does the giant television depict NYC about to be clobbered by the Milky Way? Why do all the homeless men appear to be Dick Cheney?
In other news, huge Dyker-Heights-Xmas-Lights shoutouts to last week’s new paid subscribers: Trisha M., Len B., Julia S., Erika Z., Justin D., Cherie A, Ana B., Bev, AG and Matthew E. Thank you! That’s enough $$$ for 100 post-tour egg creams at Jimmy’s Diner!
I’m very excited for this week’s issue, of course. We’ve got an interview with three New Yorkers who volunteer with a community ambulance service in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Plus, some very fun items of interest. Please enjoy.
Regards!
Anne
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FEATURE
These NYC Ambulance Volunteers Have Seen it All!
There are nonprofit, volunteer ambulance companies serving neighborhoods all over NYC. Most of the volunteers are EMS pros who just can't get enough action at their day jobs. But their ranks also include lawyers and construction workers and business owners and housewives. Can you imagine?
I’ve long been curious about these folks and was happy when, after emailing the Bed-Stuy Volunteer Ambulance Corp. in Central Brooklyn, I heard back from Commanding Officer Antoine Robinson. He invited me to come by on a Saturday afternoon to chat with a few members following the monthly volunteers meeting.
Antoine, it turns out, is an FDNY paramedic and son of the organization's founder, Captain James "Rocky" Robinson. Rocky, an EMS worker who died a few years ago, launched the BSVAC in 1988 after his niece was hit by a car at the corner of Marcus Garvey Blvd. and Greene Ave. in Bed-Stuy. He waited more than 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive; she later died of her injuries.
To cut ambulance response times in their neighborhood, Rocky and two friends started listening to 911 calls and biking to the scene with medical supplies.
The organization—located at the intersection where Rocky’s niece was struck—now has 230 members and four ambulances. It trains volunteers and helps them get certified. It responds to 1,200 calls a year! Response times in the neighborhood have fallen from 30 minutes to four.
I was surprised when I visited the BSVAC base. It's just a trailer on a vacant lot, surrounded by a chain link fence!
The lot has room for one ambulance—they have to park the other three on the street.
After the volunteer meeting, which was loud, long and filled with laughter, I got to chat with Antoine and two other volunteers—Lt. Amy Dorfman, who works by day as the director of project management at the national office of Planned Parenthood, and Melissa Webb, a champion body builder who works by day for a private ambulance service.
All three are EMTs and ambulance drivers for BSVAC. Not to mention very honest and funny. I hope you enjoy the interview that follows! Please note it has been edited and condensed from a much longer conversation.
Okay, explain! Why would anyone volunteer as an ambulance worker?
Melissa: I actually enjoy doing this. I don't look at it as work. It's knowing that this person is having the worst day of their life and I can leave a positive impression on them. It could be their last day on earth, but knowing that I'm comforting this person, that is what's rewarding to me.
Amy: It helps put things in perspective. At my office job, when people are stressing about this deadline or the report they want, I can say, "I was on the [ambulance] last week, and I had a CPR job, and that's urgent." Also, I want to be ready for the revolution! The world is changing. There can be an MCI—a multi-casualty incident. And people need to be able to support each other, take care of each other. I want to be of actual use to my community. With hard skills!
Antoine: That's cool, that's cool. I didn't have a choice. Some of my brothers and sisters tried it out, but I found a passion for it. You can't separate me from it. This is who I am. I hit the lottery tomorrow, I wouldn't know what to do. I'd be right back down here.
I read about how your dad's niece died because the ambulance didn't come in time. And he said, "I'm going to fix this!"
Antoine: You see the store across the street? The floor above it was abandoned. Pop started there. We used to have the dispatch with no electricity, no running water, no toilets. And the volunteers that came down, the only people helping at that time were people who wanted to change their life. Reformed crackheads, drug addicts, alcoholics. My father took a bunch of nobodies and said, "Run three blocks, that child is not breathing."
They were on foot!
Antoine: On foot! There was no EMS here because EMS was afraid to come to the area. They didn't care. It's like, "It's just a bunch of black people doing crack, killing themselves."
Pop found out Hatzala [a Jewish volunteer EMS service] was picking up their own people. The Jews was like, "We ain't calling 911 or no one else. We're going to do it ourselves." So that's what he did.
And then he said, 'We're going to move over here, to this lot across the street. It had abandoned cars on it. And they were turning tricks—the prostitutes—inside the cars, and selling crack. So he rented a tow truck, towed the cars off the lot. Crack dealers didn't like it! But my pop was a gangster, too. I remember when I was little, coming to the base and my pop is sitting on the chair and he got a .45 right there. I don't know if that s— was legal or not, but he had it. And now I understand why.
What's it like to drive an ambulance in the city?
Melissa: I think it's cool! You know, especially because the trucks that we drive, they're the boxy trucks. And they're pretty high up. So it's like my little self, jumping out of the truck.
Amy: I mean, as a woman especially, right? EMS is very male-dominated and the drivers, it's even more male-dominated. So as a woman driving, it has been really empowering. I feel really cool stepping out on the scene.
Melissa: The only annoying thing is when they see the lights and sirens on, people think, "They don't got nowhere to go. They just going to get lunch!" But in actuality, we are going to something.
Amy: So get out of the way!
Melissa: There's a lot of ignorance in this world, and you see it more on the job. Once, I was blocking the street. It's hard when you have a boxy truck. And this woman yelled out her car window, "I don't care what you all got going on, I need to go!" It's shocking, because these are the same people, if they were in a life-or-death situation—
Amy: They'd expect us to be there immediately, to be focused on them.
Melissa: But sometimes you're driving to jobs and people say “thank you!” They wave at us, they salute us. And that makes me melt every time.
Is this work exciting? Is your adrenaline up to eleven all the time?
Amy: It's a skill to learn to be able to manage your adrenaline. Certain jobs, you get more hyped. You get on scene, you take a deep breath, you pause, you assess the scene. You need to be calm in order to make the scene calm. You do not want to be an escalating force. We're there to de-escalate. Oftentimes, cops are on the scene, and cops aren't the best de-escalators in the world.
Antoine: Sometimes I give off an attitude, like there's no urgency. But I'm calm because I know that adrenaline will cause you to forget certain things. Or you won't hear that extra pop. You'll turn around and see all the cops running, and because of all the commotion going on in the back of the truck, you didn't realize they're having a shootout outside.
What are your favorite calls? And what calls, when you hear it over the radio, you're like, "Oh, s—, I don't want to do that!"
Melissa: I'm not a fan of seizures. And I'll tell you why. You have your regular seizure where you arrive at the scene and they're coming back to their senses. But then there's the situation where they're still seizing. They're covered in vomit, they're covered in poo, they're covered in urine and the scene is just messy. Yeah, those I'm not a fan of. Because that's so much time for your brain to have no oxygen, and you don't want the patient to end up comatose.
Antoine: Seizure jobs? I love them. Because anything that irritates the brain can cause you to have a seizure. You got an infection, you can have a seizure. You can have a stroke and have a seizure. You can be hypoxic and have a seizure. So now I've got to try to figure out what caused the seizure and how I'm going to stop it. I like the puzzle that sometimes comes along with the seizure.
Amy: And then there's EDPs—emotionally disturbed patients. A lot of times people don't like the EDPs, especially violent EDPs. But at least 50% of our calls are psych patients. And I find I'm able to talk to them, I'm able to to de-escalate, manage the conversation.
Antoine: You're supposed to be really humble, where you don't have a "favorite time" that someone is going through a tragedy. Unfortunately, I'm arrogant. I think I'm the s—! So absolute s— shows are my favorite calls. Absolute s— shows! If I get to the scene of a shooting, and there's six people shot, and everyone's panicking and running—that's my favorite call. Because I perform best at that. My least favorite is when you have to comfort the family, when someone doesn't make it.
Amy: You're in their apartment, the son is laying on the ground, and the mom is standing next to him. We did CPR and it didn't end well. And we have to pick him up off the floor, we put him on the bed.
Antoine: Tuck them in, clean their face a little bit.
Amy: And someone has to have that conversation and say, "I'm sorry, it didn't work." Then we leave and the police and the medical examiner come.
Antoine: Yeah, those are the worst. When we went through covid, it was like that every call. Every call.
Melissa: Every call, DOA.
Antoine: So those are some of the worst times and the worst things. It weighs heavy on you.
You said about about half the calls are psych calls. What's the rest?
Amy: Half trauma, half medical.
Antoine: But every trauma isn't like a critical trauma. It can be just the kid who twisted his ankle. The parents are too scared to take him to urgent care or the emergency room. They call 911. That's why the call volume is so high.
Melissa: I had a job at three o'clock in the morning. We go upstairs. He's like, "What should I do with this? What should I do with this?" And I looked at his finger and I said, "Baby, you need a Band-Aid!"
Antoine: You'd be surprised the things that people call 911 for.
Amy: One person wanted transport to the hospital so they could get their covid shot.
Antoine: I've had people call 911 outside the emergency room to take them to another hospital.
Melissa: One call, she wanted help getting from her bed to the bathroom.
Antoine: I've had those.
Melissa: Is that the best use of our time? No. But maybe they don't have family. And so sure, someone's got to help you.
Antoine: Yeah, that's what we here for.
You're sometimes competing with the city for transport jobs.
Amy: We have two different ways of picking up calls. One is called mutual aid. So we get calls through the Fire Department. We get dispatched the same way as a 911. Based on our location. The other way we get jobs is listening to the police radio. We listen in, we hear a job in our area and we try to get there before the FDNY unit gets there. Then we can take the patient and hopefully get reimbursed through their insurance.
Hahaha! It's like a race!
Amy: It's a little bit of a race. But oftentimes, we work together. And if the patient has no insurance, which they don't always do, we still take them.
I understand that insurance reimbursements and donations are your only source of revenue. But someone who's just been shot in the head, they're not going to give you their insurance card.
Amy: Nope! But we're still going. We're still gonna help.
Do you keep track of how many lives you've saved?
Amy: There's something called a ROSC—return of spontaneous circulation. That is when you get on the scene, your patient does not have a pulse, isn’t breathing. And then by the time you get them to the hospital, they are. So that's a very big deal, to bring someone back. Every year, EMS honors people—they give you awards.
Antoine: Is it valuable or not? A 17-year-old kid, you get a ROSC, it's pretty good. He can continue his life. An eighty-year-old cancer patient, what's she got to live for?
Amy: Well, they didn't have a DNR [do not resuscitate].
Antoine: I understand that. But you start to look at quality of life. If you don't have a DNR, I'm gonna do everything in my power to resuscitate you. But when I sit in the back of my truck, I think to myself, "They was down over 20 minutes. You're gonna have brain damage and stuff like that." So that's the piece that I think about, when you ask me if a ROSC is cool or not.
Last question: I think that if I did what you did, for free, there's no way I wouldn't feel great about myself!
Amy: Yes, I feel good. But it's a big responsibility. In the jobs that don't end well, or the jobs where it's my first time experiencing something, I'm always thinking, "Alright, you got to study more. You've got to be on the [ambulance] even more." So I think I carry both. The recognition and gratefulness, but also the responsibility that makes me think, "I'm never going to be good enough."
Antoine: I can sound arrogant—I think it's entertaining. But out in the field, I would never have that type of attitude. You got to remember, you don't know it all. You're not the s—. Because your s— will get handed to you real quick. You don't know what could happen!
Melissa: Do we feel good about ourselves? Absolutely. I feel good knowing that every day I wake up, I'm able to make an impact on the world, the city, my neighborhood. I treat everyone equally, with equal respect, down to the local drug addict. So I feel amazing. Knowing what I'm doing, and knowing that other people think I'm amazing. Mmm-hmm!
The Bed-Stuy Volunteer Ambulance Corp. depends on donations. You can support their efforts by making a contribution here.
ITEMS OF INTEREST
NYC’s $30,000 Private Spaghetti Club
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You really captured the individual spirits of each of those drivers. How fascinating. I had no idea that anything like this existed. Everyone involved deserves free bagels for life.
So loved the profiles but what I really want to talk about is this AI art! I keep thinking it’s going to eventually put creatives out of work, but for now it’s MESMERIZING. I had the chance to mess around on Adobe the other day and wow. Seems like everything it creates is frighteningly good at first quick glance and yet when when you actually look at the parts, it’s like a bad acid trip. Like the microwave inferno! Or like the Buddha under a tree I asked for yesterday…. His face looked like it melted away and the tree, albeit beautiful and intricate, was growing out of (instead of?) his arm.