My Past Life As A 911 Paramedic

Before AI and venture capital, there was the ambulance

Jan 29, 2026

Before I was orchestrating AI agents from the fish sticks aisle at Costco, I was doing CPR on strangers in the South Bronx. I personally pronounced the death of over 100 souls. I say “over 100” because I stopped counting once I hit the triple-digits.

To pay my way through Columbia, I worked nights and weekends as a 911 paramedic in New York City. These are my stories from that time. I wrote them under the pseudonym Tyson Lewis. On a blog called Flatline:NYC.

All of the stories are true.

If you’ve ever wondered where the hard edge comes from—the “or die” in Accelerate or Die—this is where it started. The primordial soup.

-Matt

For Compassion, an Elegy

Flatline: NYC - May 01, 2006

We found him sitting on the curb, crying, drunk, and surrounded by firemen.

“They kicked me!” he howled, “like I’m not even a person.”

I looked at him and thought, “Well, you are a drunk...”

The fire department lieutenant looked at me and smirked. “Yeah,” he said, “one of my guys gave him a little shot in the ribs to, you know, make sure he was still alive and everything. We found him passed out on the sidewalk... Now he’s saying something about having chest pain.”

I nodded and motioned for the man to stand up. I find that with drunks it is easiest to grab them with two hands, one on the belt, another on the collar. You can control their movement that way. Especially if they’re really hammered, you can kind of throw them onto the stretcher and prevent them from falling. I grabbed him and helped him into the bus.

“Twenty years ago,” he sniveled indignantly, “no one would have ever dared to kick me.”

“Oh yeah, right, back in the good ole’ days,” I said to myself.

Empathy is dangerous. It can get inside you, remind you of the you you might become.

I had never picked the man up before, which is something of a rarity with drunks, especially homeless ones. The man was Puerto Rican, named Jose, and the 14th of 14 children. He had served as a Marine in the Vietnam War and been a Corrections Officer for most of his life. I was moved by this, but not surprised. I had met two retired Corrections Officers – that is, prison guards – on the job, and they were both trainwrecks.

A lot of the EMTs I work with want to be cops, and sometimes it’s easier to get a job as a prison guard than a regular cop. I beg them with my eyes not to take the job, not to volunteer for prison duty.

Have you ever been inside an American prison?

Prison engulfs you, it cages your soul and estranges you from the world outside. It’s not just a place but a state of mind, and come-and-go as you might, your mind stays there, trapped.

Jose keeps crying and whining about being treated like a dog. I ask him if he had ever kicked anyone while he was in prison. No, he said, he would never do that. I was dubious, and looked away.

At the hospital, he thanked me profusely for being so kind, as drunks tend to do. He offered me his hand, but I didn’t want to touch it. I was afraid it was dirty, that maybe he had wiped his ass with it or jerked off in the morning. That’s what I told myself at least.

I shook his hand nonetheless, and wanted to wash it immediately.

It really wasn’t the grime that bothered me so much as his humanity.

By touching his hand and accepting his thanks, I had to recognize him as a person, not just a drunk. I didn’t care about him, really, or at least I didn’t want to.

He was just another fucking drunk with a story. I hate fucking drunks. Kick ‘em all you want, FDNY, it’s fine with me.

But in touching his hand and meeting his eyes, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for the guy. He had worked at an honorable, if thankless, job his whole life; he had served in the military and gotten shot in the knee. Now, here he was, drunk and homeless in New York City.

I felt uncomfortable, perhaps a little guilty.

I could care about you, but that would mean giving some of me to you, and I don’t have that much of myself to go around.

A long time ago, when I was 18 and I had just become an EMT, I thought I was gonna save the world. I remember one day I went over to People’s Park in Berkeley, where all the homeless slept, and offered them whatever medical assistance I could.

Jesus, I think to myself now, what was I doing?

Medicine – EMS – has changed me, made me less sympathetic to the world. I try to remember how I thought about the world and about people before I was in EMS, and I can barely remember it. That person that I was seems so foreign, so distant from who I am today.

When I first started working as an EMT, I would tell my friends how much the job makes me appreciate the fragility of my own life and how much it compels me to adopt a Carpe Diem outlook.

Yeah, that phase is over. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the job, but I’m not a bright eyed kid anymore. I look at patients with one eye and another fixed on the cold calculus of self-preservation.

I could care about you, but that would mean giving some of me to you, and I don’t have that much of myself to go around.

Empathy is dangerous – it can get inside you, remind you of the you you might become. It can make you imagine your father’s heart attack or your sister’s suicide. It can make you feel like you might be a patient, and that’s all well and good when you’re a kid with heart and love to spare. But I ain’t that kid anymore.

And here, today, on my stretcher, you’re just another fucking drunk and I don’t have time for your bullshit.

I know this post isn’t as polished or dramatic as my usual writing, but it’s the straight shit, it’s how I feel, unedited, and the thing is, I want to be a good person and I still want to make the world a better place. But sometimes, I don’t. Maybe I’m a bad person for feeling this way and thinking these things, but surely, I’m not alone.

Posted by Tyson Lewis on May 01, 2006
Photo by Brenda Ann Kenneally

I know this piece isn’t my usual faire. I’ve never shared these diaries with anyone. It’s an experiment. Want more? Want less? Let me know. Tell me how it makes you feel.

EDIT: Doug 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 this field, but the psychic costs are extreme.