Chris Jones, on the strange happiness of the emergency medic:
[P]aramedics are a surprisingly sunny bunch. They understand that it’s all so much randomness anyway, a cosmic confluence of vectors. One night, four kids got into a car and raced down the slushy streets until the driver lost control. The car spun like a roulette wheel before it was finally stopped by a streetlight. One kid, unlucky enough to have chosen the seat that ended up with the streetlight in it, suffered massive head injuries. The other three walked away. They knew the out-of-body feeling that follows the cheating of death, the feeling that every day between that day and their last will be a gift that so easily could have gone unopened. Paramedics know that feeling better than anyone, because they walk out of nightmares unscathed again and again. They know what a genuinely bad day really looks like, and they know that day will come for them, too, but today is not that day, and that knowledge alone was reason enough for Suzanne to smile.