Lindsey Kaczmarek gets called an ambulance driver more often than she gets called a paramedic. “That’s absolutely not what I do,” she told me. What she does do is show up when someone needs medical help, figure out what’s wrong with them, and do whatever she can to help them survive the trip to the hospital—in her case, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The primary symptom for one in three 911 medical calls is simply “pain,” but during any given shift, Kaczmarek might attend to a heart attack, a stroke, a car crash, a labor and delivery gone wrong, a mental-health crisis, a shooting, or an elderly patient suffering from a severe urinary tract infection. “If they’re not breathing, I will breathe for them,” she said. “If their heart’s not beating, I will be the heartbeat for them.” The job of providing emergency medical services, or EMS, often resembles medical detective work, with limited clues, no specialists to consult, and very little, if any, of the sophisticated equipment a...
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