Jennifer Murphy’s new book reveals behind-the-scenes stress of front-line workers

March 30, 2021 Caleb Miller, Special to Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Brooklyn-based EMT and "First Responder" Jennifer Murphy. Photo by Axel Dupeux

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When Jennifer Murphy became a volunteer EMT in 2018, she knew she’d come face-to-face with trauma and tragedy, but nothing could have prepared her for the harrowing calls she’d respond to when COVID devastated New York City last March. And while the pandemic finally brought EMTs and paramedics some recognition for their dedication to a stressful and life-threatening job, Murphy realized that the public still barely understood the world of EMS, so she put her story into words with “First Responder: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Love on New York City’s Front Lines,” coming out April 6.

A native Californian, Murphy, 45, “always dreamed of living in New York,” moved to lower Manhattan in the 1990s and earned an MFA from NYU. She always wanted to write fiction, and holds a day job in crisis management and intel.

When soaring rental prices forced her out of Manhattan, she moved first to Fort Greene and more recently to Bedford-Stuyvesant. While she loves the neighborhood, she admits she was wary about contributing to the area’s gentrification. “I feel at home here, but it is complicated,” Murphy said. “I didn’t want to move into a home that a Black family had inhabited and kick them out.”

Instead, she found a building that had been uninhabited and collapsing before being renovated, and the diversity in her building and neighborhood have reinforced her love for New York. “Whenever I step away, I get this kind of homesickness for New Yorkers,” she said. “The kind of people in my life here wouldn’t be in my life if I were in middle America or suburban America or the West Coast.”

Murphy hopes to shine a light on the challenges faced by EMTs. “There’s a tendency among first responders to turn to alcohol, high-risk sexual behavior, or working more, to reduce stress,” said Murphy, arguing for more mental health support systems for EMTs and paramedics. But, she contends, badly underpaid EMS workers first need proper financial compensation.

“It’s nice to say that everybody can go to trauma therapy, but if they can’t pay their rent and have to live with their parents, it becomes a secondary issue,” she said. “Once you have economic justice, then you can normalize getting help.”

Jennifer Murphy’s look into the lives of EMTs is slated to be published on April 6.

Was the pandemic a catalyst for you telling the story of EMS?

I had always preferred writing fiction, but after the spring we were seeing the unspeakable, and we were the only people seeing it. I felt like I had to write down these stories or they’d be forever lost when we move out of this disaster.

The memoir is very honest and intimate. When did you decide to include so much about your personal life?

I was writing with a broken heart and when you’re in rage and grief and chaos, the difficult stories come out. I didn’t want to write a book where we’re the rescuers and we don’t suffer as well. We’ve heard those hero narratives too much, and I wanted to remind people that we’re human beings too.

You discuss how EMTs are almost invisible to many people, and that the recognition the pandemic brought was brief. Why do EMTs struggle to get the credit they deserve?

It’s multifaceted. We’ve had mayors for years that have devalued EMS work. Some people think it’s a union problem, some blame the Fire Department for privileging the fire suppression side and ignoring and underfunding EMS. I think one problem is narrative. The public does not truly understand what we do and I felt very strongly that that missing piece had to be told.

Did the sacrifice and dedication of your friend Pat, a firefighter who died saving people during 9/11, play a role in you becoming an EMT?

It was a huge influence. As tragic as it was, I also found the life of service and sacrifice very inspiring. A lot of first responders signed up to be EMTs, paramedics and firefighters after 9/11.

The same thing happened with COVID. People ask me to explain the logic of volunteering for a disaster, but the state had almost 90,000 people sign up to volunteer to help the front lines when COVID hit last spring. There were so many applicants that the state couldn’t process the paperwork to get them in the field.

As an EMT, do you feel a need to help everyone?

It’s something I suffered from for my whole life, trying to martyr myself and help everyone, which is an exhausting way to be and also not really effective and kind of arrogant; not everybody needs my help. Being an EMT helped me counter my urge to step in and perform rescues. The urge doesn’t go away, but unless I’m specifically asked and somebody shows a real need, I try to mind my own business. When I’m in uniform, that’s my job, and when I’m out of uniform, I can just live my life.

How long can you remain an EMT in the face of the emotional and physical toll?

The career of an EMT is typically five years. In New York City you’re going to see horrific traumas pretty quickly. You get desensitized pretty fast. Once you get a lot of experience, you can do it with your eyes closed and your body doesn’t really rev up, but the cost of that is pretty high. Last spring, I had such a hard time managing my civilian friends — they were anxious, watching the news, stressed, losing jobs, but it didn’t compare to what we were seeing on the street and I had a hard time communicating with them. I felt for soldiers who come back from war; this is why they get addicted to redeploying, because they can’t relate to people anymore. We were in another world and were not experiencing what everybody else was experiencing.

A lot of EMTs and paramedics are really struggling now. I don’t know any first responder who doesn’t feel thoroughly burned out, as well as quietly disappointed and broken-hearted. Some are still in the rage stage, I’ve gone into the acceptance stage, partly because I have a place to tell the story.

But it’s often not the medical trauma that sticks with you, it’s the sadder calls where you feel like, “Wow, our system is so broken.” Like this person is suffering from drug abuse but they’re also living in a shelter so it’s poverty-related and they have a psych diagnosis so it’s also a mental health issue, and then we take them to an ER and they don’t really want them. Calls where people are falling through the cracks stay with me longest.

During the height of the pandemic, what provided you with relief and comfort?

One of the things that helped me most is EMDR therapy, which I’ve been doing for years, as a way to wash the experience off if I have a really hard night on the ambulance.

The larger question the book asks is: who rescues the rescuers? And I think the answer is, we do. I’m checking on my medic friends, they’re checking on me, the cops are checking on me, I’m checking on the firefighters. It’s a world where we take care of each other, and that has been a great salve.

Also, surrounding myself with nature has been helpful, my apartment looks insane with plants. And writing, exercise, meditation have been helpful.

In the book, you say COVID exposed our systems’ flaws. Will this allow us to better tackle those issues or has the pandemic set us back so much financially and psychologically that fixing those problems becomes even harder?

It’s a time where we are awake, painfully awake, in a new way. But America has a tendency to go back to sleep, to puddle jump from disaster to disaster. There was just a mass shooting — the pandemic relieved us of that for a moment and now it’s back. And it’s going to continue because it’s an unaddressed issue, just as our healthcare system’s problems will continue.

We start with the stories of the people that are bearing the brunt of the injustices. We start listening to people who are really suffering and we try to align ourselves with them. My hope is that my book can do a similar thing for EMS, to force people to understand that we can’t continue to run 911 like this. It’s not just bad for EMTs and paramedics, it’s bad for New Yorkers. I want people to feel what it’s like on the ambulance, how scary, joyful, hilarious, weird, magnificent, hard, thankless, and tiring it is.