Douglas Muth asked:

What the hell is wrong with you?

My answer: That, my friend, is the whole point of the piece. What hell was wrong with me?

Twenty years later and thousand miles away, it’s so easy to condemn.

The truth is, the job darkened me. It stained my soul. It turned me into someone I would not recognize if I had not lived through it and eventually come out the other side.

Flatline: NYC, indeed.

I don’t condone it. I don’t approve of it. But I also don’t apologize for it.

In my time as a 911 paramedic, I saved >1,000 people’s lives. Easily. I helped a lot of people. But it came at a cost. The pricetag was my humanity.

Honestly, I think the real culprit was the overtime. Back when I wrote this, I was working 50-60 hours a week on the ambulance, then going to school part-time. The constant work. The 12- and 16-hour overnight shifts. The murders. The child abuse. The grieving mothers. The junkie moms. All the horrible shit, all the time. It burned me out. It turned me into someone I never thought I could become.

I'd bet a large part of why police abuse happens is downstream of the very real emotional traumas (I do not use that word lightly) that cops experience. Overtime (which pays 1.5x hourly) is how you make real money in the emergency services industry, but the psychic costs are extreme.