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EMS House of DeFrance http://www.emshouse.com Reading Rotunda Courtesy the EMS House of DeFrance http://www.defrance.org "In the early 1990s, lacking direction after a breakup with a girlfriend, Shannon Burke left New Orleans (where he’d been working in a bookstore), moved to New York and took a job on an ambulance crew. He was drawn to emergency medicine partly out of guilt, he later explained to a paramedic friend. Back in the French Quarter, he had come upon a tourist, shot in the head, and had been unable to help her. “I thought I should have known first aid,” he recalled. “Like I could have saved her.” Burke went to Manhattan as a kind of personal test because “I figured it would be the most extreme place to do it.” In the five years he served on city ambulances, first as an E.M.T., later as a paramedic at Station 18, on 136th Street across from Harlem Hospital, he saw unspeakable horrors. Unspeakable, but not inexpressible. " The
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