A Real Emergency

Stories from the Ambulance

De: Joanna Sokol

Narrado por: Joanna Sokol, Araya Mengesha, Emily Nixon, Wayne Ward

Introspective, richly layered, and surprisingly hopeful, A Real Emergency is a love letter from a paramedic to the best and worst parts of her career.

For fifteen years, Joanna Sokol filled private notebooks with her confusion, humor, and anger toward the strange world of emergency street medicine. As her career on the ambulance progressed, she found herself taking notes on scraps of paper, the backs of gloves, and in the margins of EKG printouts. She listened to her patients’ stories, left food out for their pets, and turned off the stove under their oxtail stews. Once, she read half a poem left in a dead woman’s typewriter. She learned about the history that brought ambulances into their current role as the caretakers of society’s forgotten and spoke to her colleagues about their own experiences and perspectives.

Those reflections are collected here, in a series of raw, powerful essays about the state modern healthcare.

Sokol’s life as a paramedic took her to three different counties: the casinos and trailer parks of the Nevada desert, the cozy beach town of Santa Cruz, and, eventually, the crowded tenements of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. There are no clear villains or heroes in Sokol’s world, only a group of patients and medics who are doing their best in a deeply broken system. 

Combining impactful research, compassionate reflections on her most memorable patients, and the strong voices of her fellow paramedics, Sokol takes listeners deep into the everyday reality of 911 first responders, offering insight, empathy, and a reminder of both the power and limitations of care.

©2025 Joanna Sokol (P)2025 Strange Light

Reseñas de la Crítica

"After a decade on the frontlines of a very broken system, Joanna Sokol has let loose one hell of a memoir: compelling, shocking, funny, galling, urgent, and beautiful. The best I've read in quite some time."—Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author

"A Real Emergency deserves a place among the great work memoirs. Compassionate, humourous, a flat-out fantastic book."—Caitlin Doughty, bestselling author of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, From Here to Eternity, and Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

“I would read Joanna Sokol’s grocery lists, her texts, her musings on anything. Her work is raw, poignant, and funny. She drops you into the rarely seen world of street medicine—Narcan and mending tools at the ready—in a way few other writers can. At a time when paramedics increasingly serve as safety-net bridges to care, A Real Emergency is a gift of understanding and, ultimately, hope.”—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus

Get out of my head!

This is spot on for what it’s like and what went thru my head working 911. Sokol’s artful prose with a liberal use of fuk paints the wild experience of ambulance life in such colorful and hard hitting vignettes. The listener gets to ride with Jo from her start to finish with EMS in Reno, NV to SF, CA. The addition of words from fellow EMS professionals broadens the experience to more than just her voice, showing the familiarity that all who work 911 EMS have.
Thank you Jo!!! Safe travels!

Curse words

I was met long before I became md. This account may be accurate but the disrespect and cursing is abhorrent! This author is a poor excuse of one I’d want to take care of a loved one or myself. There needs to be a warning for foul language before purchasing a book!