 An entomologist assistant, a lab technician, clinical research coordinator, stagehand, set carpenter, modern and aerial dancer, and EMT. Very well rounded. Please welcome Courtney Moreno. So the book Incase of Emergency is about Piper who's kind of a hot mess but she works as an EMT in Los Angeles and South Central and at the beginning of the book she's kind of a rookie and then as things go along she gets saltier and saltier. So I'm going to read two short sections. What do you do? The sky is circling the drain. I'm kneeling in front of a mannequin that represents an unresponsive patient with slow breathing, warm skin and dumping vitals. The long sleeve collared shirt I chose to wore feels ridiculous. The man conducting the interview, Vincent, leans over me yelling. We're both sweating in the Los Angeles summer heat and I push the hair out of my eyes using the inside of my elbow. In EMT school I learned to avoid using my hands for anything except the patient. It's best to think of my gloves and therefore my hands is covered in germs at all times. The plastic dummies eyes have no pupils and look oblong instead of spherical. I don't have a clue as to what's going on with this patient. He needs advanced life support, firefighter paramedics, a hospital emergency room. Emergency medical technicians can give oxygen, help administer some drugs and do CPR. He's going to need more than that. What are you going to do, Piper? Vincent asked me again. If this was your boyfriend, your mother, your sister, your best friend, what would you be doing? I know he's just trying to agitate me, but I consider it. Well, I'd probably be crying. He leans in closer, his face inches from mine and roars, pull your shit together. This is EMS. Yes, sir. The thin carpet of Vincent's office chafes my aching knees. What's going on with this patient? I can't afford to lose momentum now. I spent the last of my savings on the four-week EMT program, and I refuse to slink out of this office anything that employed. Warm skin, lowered pulse rate, slow deep breathing, loss of consciousness. Could the slow deep breathing be kusma respirations? Oh, I say with relief. He's got DKA. Vincent tilts his head slightly. He's impressed, but tries to hide it. And what is that? I tell him what he already knows. Great ketoacidosis occurs when someone's blood sugar skyrockets without the presence of insulin, and it's unable to enter the cells. All the cells in this patient's body are starving. If this goes on for too long, he may slip into a coma or even die. I'm hired. Vincent gives me a tour of headquarters, the offices, the supply room with its stacked oxygen tanks. We walk outside so I can admire the fleet of ambulances in the mechanic shop before circling back to the hallway outside his office. And Vincent tells me what I already know. A&O Ambulance is the best company in the Los Angeles area, with widespread coverage, the most 911 exposure, and a killer reputation. My field training officer will be Ruth McCarthy, who is also, I see, employee of the year. Her ferocious grin on the placard hanging in the hallway looks more like she's gritting her teeth and smiling. I know she must have proved herself many times over to earn that plaque, but mostly I'm just relieved I don't find her attractive. Field training is going to be hard enough already. Vincent points at a large map, big enough to cover the side of a bus as he explains the company's basic operations. A&O has 20 stations throughout the Los Angeles area. They cover east to west LA, as well as Long Beach, and as far north as Pasadena. I find the UR Hears sticker, which represents the Gardena headquarters we're standing in. I've lived in LA my whole life and haven't spent an hour in Gardena before today. We need someone in the busiest area, kid, so I hope you're ready for this. He points at a yellow circle representing station 710. South Central, 24-hour shifts. You'll do your training there, too. On my way out of the office, I run into a kid maybe 10 years younger than me, who even as he's washing down an ambulance gives the sense that he's seen everything. He probably wouldn't get nervous if his own mother was flopping like a fish in front of him. Maybe his tattoos remind me of my ex, or maybe it's the way he works over the water tobacco in his mouth before letting loose a stream that lands near my shoe. But I take an instant dislike. After the obligatory cool appraisal, he asks where I'm going to be working, and nods when I tell him, get ready to grab your ankles, he says. All right, we're going to fast forward to when she's a bit saltier. Oh, and the two things you need to know about this. So she started dating someone, this woman, Aila, who she then got in a fight with right before the shift. And also the last shift that she worked, she saw a particularly bad call. Our first call this morning is a man on a bicycle who got doored by an eccentric older woman. He's not wearing a helmet, just a t-shirt and ratty jeans. She's wearing a trim little hat with a large purple flower, gaudy earrings and crooked makeup. She keeps looking at him, lying on the concrete in front of her, at the blood rushing out of his broken nose, and the wrist bent at a cock-eyed angle. She keeps saying over and over, but I checked my rear view mirror three times before I got out of the car, and she holds up three fingers as if to prove it. He responds, his speech slurred by a trauma thick in tongue, then that's three times you would've seen me, lady, because I was there, and he holds up one finger before passing out. When William and I go to load our patient, I look into the yawn of the back of the ambulance and feel my eyes burn. Turning to him, I say very slowly and deliberately, I'm driving. I hold up my hand for the keys. To my surprise, he places them in my palm without a single snide word. As the day moves on, William and I say very little to each other, but find a rhythm just the same. We get a call for a GSW and en route to the residence, I become anxious, my skin prickling, but upon arriving at 842 on Gramercy, we find a man who shot a hole through his own left foot by accident. He'd been cleaning his rifle and forgot to clean the chamber. We get put on standby for a bomb threat for about two hours, 25 pounds of TNT, later we found out dispatch made a mistake, instead of posting us a safe distance away, they put us right on top of the supposed explosives. That actually happened, by the way. We pick up a woman outside the Inglewood courthouse who claims a penis has been stuck inside of her vagina for the last six years, and the firefighters ask me to do the assessment since I'm the only one who isn't doubled over with laughter. I comply, scribbling down notes on their run sheet, on set, sex with their ex-husband six years ago, paliation gets worse and grows larger with thoughts of sex, quality, radiation, severity, nine out of ten severe throbbing pain that's intermittent. We drop her off at Crossroads Hospital with a pillow under her knees and shake our heads when the triage nurse asks if we visualize the chief complaint. By her seventh call, I'm used to the way the whale of the sirens emulates the sing-song repetition in my head. Will she call? Will she call? Will she call? There's nothing else to do but wonder. I've left messages and sent texts. Stubborn in my mind is the thought that Ayla won't and can't give up, that what's begun between us is simply too good for either of us to let go of. But this thought is coupled with doubt. Maybe I don't really know her. Maybe everything I thought I knew is a projection, hers or mine. Maybe she was just waiting to walk away. Maybe I'll be better off if she does. 841 Gramercy at 84th, William says, just head down Manchester. Again, I ask, he shrugs. Will she call? Will she call? Will she call? It's dark when we pull up to the little gray house. The man who lives here was having a few drinks with his neighbor when he decided to tell her the story of earlier, even reenact it for her by propping the rifle in his lap and waving his hands at the freshly bandaged foot. When we prepare to take him to the hospital for shooting himself in the same foot a second time, the man refuses this also happened. The man refuses to answer any questions. I don't want to talk about it, he says. And his neighbor hides behind the sofa in order to cover her laugh. At the hospital, my partner's mood shifts. We need to clean it again, he says to the back of the rig. It's starting to smell. I think blood must have soaked down into the floor plates from that kid. Thanks. Thank you so much, Courtney Marino. In case of emergency, a new novel from McSweeney's came out today. Congratulations.