ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Casey is a writer, health educator and public speaker. Brian was born in Mason City Iowa and grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota; Wauwatosa, Wisconsin; and Stillwater, Minnesota. He earned a teaching degree from the University of Minnesota. Casey has spent his entire adult working life as an EMT, paramedic, EMS educator and police officer.
His latest book, Ambulance Man, highlights a uniquely intense and rewarding occupation, a story that has not been widely told. Ambulance Man is the sometimes funny, sometimes frightening, but always heartfelt story of a young man’s entry into ambulance work.
Casey is also the author of Peer Support Fundamentals and Good Cop Good Cop – A Get Healthy Stay Healthy Guide for Law Enforcement. You can learn more about him at PeerSupportSupport.com.
A Note from the Author about Writing Ambulance Man
Although public safety workers will no doubt enjoy the illumination of their work, I did not write Ambulance Man for them. Instead, it is written and intended for a broad audience. As stated earlier, the police story has been widely written and portrayed, the firefighter unceasingly praised, yet it is the ambulance EMT or paramedic who suddenly appears at the side of the sick and injured. My book allows the reader to experience the sights, sounds, strategies and raw emotions of an occupation what remains a mystery to most.
It is remarkable that I even wrote a book (my second) considering my learning disability, or as I described it in the book, my “reading problem.” Yet, it could be that my deficit, which I kept hidden, helped me notice, record, and eventually reshape experiences into engaging and original retellings. I recognize that I move about the world of words in a way that to this day I don’t fully understand.
As I state in the epilogue: My reading problem may have cleared a path for me, made a space for me to let my attention be drawn elsewhere. The things I noticed, and am able to recall in detail, were the things I valued and wished to capture. Ambulance Man was a means to re-experience them and honor the otherwise anonymous, knowing these people and events would otherwise be forever lost. I sought a dangerous path and lived to tell of it, and wrote it all down as if my life depended on it.
Since about the age of fifteen I always had a scrap of paper in my pocket on which could be found a scribbled thought or image. When I started ambulance work, I thought it important to keep a log of the basic facts of each and every call. As a career paramedic, the keeping of a log would be too laborious, so I wrote down only what seemed too valuable to be allowed to just fade away. In fact, I have always maintained a fear of allowing both the profound and the otherwise oddly-significant ordinary events to disappear without some sort of record. Interestingly, at the end of a given shift, usually nothing seemed very significant or noteworthy; however, after a day or two, the memories of certain events took on more meaning or significance, and I’d simply record what I’d seen, heard, felt or thought.
I have accumulated a massive collection of unedited writing that has spanned my ambulance work career in Stillwater, Spokane, and Minneapolis, and later, my days as a patrolman in Saint Paul. Of note, the book Ambulance Man, which spans my early days as an EMT and first two years as a career paramedic, was written over several years from memory, using the collection of writings for added detail as needed.