There are three loaves of bread sticking out of a paper bag in the passenger seat of the car. I recognized them from the bakery on Park Street where people pick up fresh long loaves of the crusty pan de agua (water) bread hot out of the ovens when the shop opens at six. It…
“He cut them down in droves–the corpse fires burned on, night and day, no end in sight.” – The Illiad -Homer (Robert Fagles translation). In 2017, for a powerpoint presentation on the opioid epidemic, I made a slide that showed a graph of annual nationwide fatal ODs (about 15,000) from when I started as a…
“You’re covering the city,” dispatch says to us, when we clear Saint Francis after an early morning cardiac arrest. We park on Albany Avenue. The sun isn’t up yet, but the black birds are stirring. We’re on for another ten hours. By midday, we’ll have twenty ambulances on, but right now it is only us. …
(This is an excerpt from a fictional work-in-progress.) Frank Anastacio walked out of the brick building with a small paper bag in his hand. His work boots trudged forward, each step taking him deeper into a world he no longer wanted to live in. The autopsy report said she had died of asphyxia from tying…
When I started as a paramedic in Hartford, many of my coworkers referred to the city as a shit hole. They said this as they put on or took off their bullet proof vests at our base and swapped stories about the populace they encountered in the inner city, drunks and deadbeats, and addicts and…
This week I have been reading/listening to Sam Quinones new book “The Least of Us” about the changes in the opioid epidemic caused by the shift from heroin to fentanyl and the shift from ephedrine-based methamphetamine to a more dangerous type he calls P2P meth. A federal drug agent told me a few years ago…