“Bringing Out the Dead” by Joe Connelly has been identified by many EMS professionals to be much closer to the real world of what it is like to be in EMS than most other media. Having now read the book and watched the movie and begun to experience what it is really like to be doing this on a full-time basis, I tend to agree. It is extremely clear to me that there was a lot of thought put into making this not only an interesting story, but also accurate enough that professionals in the industry and say to themselves, that is what that is really like, wow. The original author of the book, Joe Connelly was a Paramedic in New York City at one of the hospitals running 911 calls for a number of years. He also attended Columbia University where he was in a class taught by a family friend of mine. That is what originally drew me to this particular text. However, after I had finished reading and watching the movie, I saw a name on the schedule for a partner I had never worked with before. Come to find out that this person, Peter Halleck, was actually one of Connelly’s old partners. This was a coincidence I could not not take advantage of, so I picked Peter’s brain a bit about what it was actually like to be a Medic in New York City in the 1990s. Much of this lined up with what I had read and watched and even what I have experienced. There is too much to cover in this short blog post about how eerily close this film and book line up with the real world, but they both come highly recommended by me if you want to understand what this profession is like.

“Bringing Out the Dead” -Joe Connelly

“Bringing Out the Dead” -Paul Schrader