Book Reviews
Breathe
Essays from a Recovering Paramedic by
Marianne Paiva
Essays by an ambulance
paramedic saving lives in rural Northern California
An ambulance speeds through the night in tule fog across the Central Valley of California, siren blaring, EMTs ready, racing, praying to save lives. These essays follow Marianne Paiva in her captivating and heart wrenching adventures as she recalls her four-year journey as an emergency medical technician in the small farm towns and back roads of Glenn County, California. Told with an ultimately uplifting and descriptive power, this collection describes those precious minutes after we dial 911. Exciting and adventurous and written with great compassion, Breathe is a book you can’t put down. --Claire Braz-Valentine
His heart will beat and the lungs will try to breathe, but the brain has already died and there is nothing I, or any other human, can do to save this child.
It is my job, though. It is my responsibility to perform the necessary functions, intubate, defibrillate, medicate. The voice inside my head, the one that says, “Do your job,” tells me to assemble my equipment, kneel before this child, breathe for him, compress the heart muscle if need be, be the barrier, if only for a little while, between life and death. --excerpt from first chapter
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