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The Calls That Stay With Us

A publication about the EMS calls we can’t forget — and what they teach us. EMTs, medics, and rescue professionals share the raw, often untold stories from behind the sirens.

Birth, and Everything Else

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There’s something we almost never talk about in EMS — not because it’s rare, but because it doesn’t match the rest of what we see. It doesn’t belong in the same category as cardiac arrests, stabbings, overdoses, trauma codes. It’s too… sacred. Too fragile. Too full of possibility.

Childbirth.

The one call where, maybe — just maybe — we’re not there for someone’s worst day.

Maybe we’re there for someone’s best.

That possibility hovers in the back of every medic’s mind. We joke about it, deflect it — “I’d rather do five cardiac arrests than one delivery” — but we all think about it. Because amid all the death, the chaos, the wreckage, birth is the one thing that might give us a little light. A little grace.

I’ve never delivered a baby in the field. But I’ve come close. Five times. And every single one stayed with me — not because of what almost happened, but because of everything else wrapped around it.

The first time, she’d been in a car crash. Not a bad one. She was shaken, not injured. She was also in labor. We loaded her gently, got her settled, and rode code to the hospital. The baby came shortly after we wheeled her in. Healthy. Breathing. Screaming. I didn’t deliver the child, but I witnessed a woman go from wreckage to motherhood in less than 30 minutes. It felt like the world had reset itself.

For a second.

The second time, it was different. A woman with preeclampsia, and the highest blood pressure I have ever seen with my own eyes: 280 over 220. Her vision was going — right in front of me, like someone was slowly turning the lights off behind her eyes. She was two months early. She knew something was wrong. So did I.

I held her hand in the back of the rig while the monitor screamed. Told her to breathe. Tried to act like I wasn’t scared. We rolled into the trauma bay fast, shouting vitals. I later heard that both she and the baby made it. I still don’t know how.

The third time, we walked into a motel that smelled like rot and broken things. A young woman on a bed. Laboring. Alone, except for six men standing around her. No one was helping. No one looked at her. They just… watched. We didn’t ask questions we didn’t need the answers to. We got her out, fast.

She made it. The baby didn’t.

I still think about what that baby’s first — and only — moments were like. If they were quiet. If they were painful. If they were held.

The fourth time, we were cleaning the rig after a call when a woman and a man walked up to the station. She said she was in labor. She didn’t know she was pregnant. She was in her early 40s, homeless, and told us, plainly, that she was addicted to heroin.

The ride to the hospital was silent at first. Then crying. Then questions. She wasn’t crying for herself. She was crying for the baby. For the idea that someone might be born into a world she couldn’t survive in herself. I held her hand. I told her we’d do everything we could.

I never found out what happened to her, or to the baby. But I’ve imagined it more times than I can count. I don’t like most of the endings my mind gives me.

And then there was the fifth.

It wasn’t just that she was young. It wasn’t just that she was scared. It was that she was alone, even in a room full of people. Labor doesn’t care what your life looks like. It comes when it comes. It doesn’t pause for circumstance, or addiction, or broken homes, or bad timing. It just arrives.

And we arrive with it.

Here’s the thing: childbirth in EMS is not a soft-focus moment of magic. It’s raw. It’s desperate. It’s messy and loud and sometimes terrifying. But inside all of that is the possibility of something rare in this work:

Hope.

When you work in EMS, you get to see life end in all its forms. Sudden, slow, violent, peaceful. But birth? You might see that once. Maybe.

And when you do, it doesn’t cleanse you. It doesn’t balance the ledger.

But it reminds you that this job isn’t just about holding the line between life and death.

Sometimes, we get to usher something in — not just keep something from going out.

That’s a different kind of responsibility. A different kind of weight.

And it stays with you.

In EMS, we brace for the worst because we have to. But sometimes — just sometimes — we’re called not to witness the end, but the beginning. And that possibility, even when wrapped in tragedy, is enough to keep a piece of you soft. Because no matter what else we do out there, we are always standing at the edge of something sacred.

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The Calls That Stay With Us
The Calls That Stay With Us

Published in The Calls That Stay With Us

A publication about the EMS calls we can’t forget — and what they teach us. EMTs, medics, and rescue professionals share the raw, often untold stories from behind the sirens.

Ari Meisel
Ari Meisel

Written by Ari Meisel

Founder — Less Doing /The Replaceable Founder/ Overwhelmologist/Serial Entrepreneur / Ironman / Author / Inventor

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